How to Set Up a Salesforce Connection with Celigo CLI

Learn how to set up a Salesforce connection with Celigo CLI, including creating the connection, completing OAuth authorization, and verifying it from the command line.

Published August 14, 2026

This tutorial builds on How to Get Started with Celigo CLI and How to Create Your First Integration with Celigo CLI. You should already have the CLI configured and a first-integration directory from the previous post.

In this post, we’ll add the Salesforce connection that will serve as the source for the flow we’ll build later. The flow will extract accounts assigned to Account Managers from Salesforce and write the results to dedicated Google Sheets tabs.

The workflow separates connection configuration from authentication. Define the connection in JSON, create it with celigo connections create, authorize it with celigo connections authorize, and verify it with celigo connections ping.

Create the Salesforce Connection

From first-integration, create a connections directory for connection definitions:

cd first-integration
mkdir connections
cd connections

Create the connection definition as celigo-cli-demo-only-salesforce-connection.json

TIP: Use descriptive resource names. Clear names make resources easier to identify and manage as an integration grows.

nvim celigo-cli-demo-only-salesforce-connection.json

The required fields are type and name. The type identifies the connector, while name provides a readable name for the connection. Additional Salesforce-specific settings can be defined in a nested salesforce object when needed.

{
  "type": "salesforce",
  "name": "Salesforce Connection (Demo Only)"
}

Create the connection by redirecting the definition file to the CLI:

celigo connections create < celigo-cli-demo-only-salesforce-connection.json

The < operator redirects the contents of the file to the command’s standard input. The CLI reads that JSON as the resource definition for the creation request.

Once the command completes successfully, the connection is created in integrator.io, and the CLI returns the connection ID, timestamps, name, and other resource properties:

~/first-integration/connections ❯ celigo connections create < celigo-cli-demo-only-salesforce-connection.json
_id                           6a7ff1dbe27c416118751eb0
createdAt                     2026-08-15T04:58:03.795Z
lastModified                  2026-08-15T04:58:03.827Z
type                          salesforce
name                          Salesforce Connection (Demo Only)
enableMicroBatchForOneToMany  true
enableCsvObjectParsing        true
salesforce                    {
  "scope": [],
  "concurrencyLevel": 5,
  "targetConcurrencyLevel": 5
}
autoRecoverRateLimitErrors    true
microServices                 {
  "disableNetSuiteWebservices": false,
  "disableNetSuiteDistributed": false,
  "disableNetSuiteProxy": false,
  "disableHttp": false,
  "disableS3": false,
  "disableSalesforce": false,
  "disableAs2": false,
  "disableFtp": false,
  "disableAs2File": false,
  "disableDataLoaderFile": false
}

NOTE: The connection definition contains no authentication material. For OAuth-based connections, authentication is handled separately through celigo connections authorize rather than stored in the resource definition.

You can verify the new connection from the integrator.io web interface or query it directly from the CLI:

celigo connections list --format json

Authorizing and Testing the Connection

Authorize the connection to complete the Salesforce OAuth flow:

celigo connections authorize 6a7ff1dbe27c416118751eb0

The command opens the Salesforce authorization flow in a browser and waits for authorization to complete.

You can verify the connection at any time:

celigo connections ping 6a7ff1dbe27c416118751eb0

ping sends a test request to the remote system to verify the connection.

NOTE: In a headless environment, authorize can’t open a browser. Pass --print-url to print the authorization URL so you can complete the flow manually.

At this point you should have a structure like this:

~/first-integration ❯ tree
├──  connections
│   └── {} celigo-cli-demo-only-salesforce-connection.json
└── {} integrations.json

In the next post, How to Set Up a Google Sheets Connection with Celigo CLI, we’ll configure the destination connection for the series flow, enabling it to write data to Google Sheets.