Deployment Connection
A deployment connection is what a DevOps tool authenticates through to move metadata into an org, and a misconfigured one is the most common reason a pipeline just stops.
Definition
A deployment connection is the authenticated link, typically an OAuth connected app or a Salesforce CLI auth session, that a CI/CD tool or DevOps platform uses to deploy metadata into a specific org. Because each org needs its own valid session or refresh token, a connection that worked yesterday can fail today for reasons that have nothing to do with the code being deployed: an expired session, an IP restriction that changed, a connected app whose OAuth policy got tightened, or a user whose password reset invalidated a stored token. These failures often show up as generic authentication errors in CI logs rather than anything pointing at the actual cause, which makes a broken deployment connection one of the more frustrating things to debug in a Salesforce pipeline, especially for teams managing connections to a dozen or more sandboxes by hand. Our CI/CD pipeline guide covers setting up reliable deployment connections.
How it works in Serpent
Serpent manages the authenticated connection to every org from one place, refreshing sessions automatically and surfacing a broken connection before a release attempts to deploy through it, instead of failing mid-pipeline with a generic error. See org management in Serpent for how connections are handled.
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