Welcome! This is my personal blog about Web technologies, software development, open source and other related topics
The ideas and opinions expressed here are solely mine and don't represent those of others, either individuals or companies.The code snippets or references to software products or analogous are to be used without any warranty of any kind. If you enjoy the content, feel free to share it and re-use it as long as you provide a link to the original post.
This blog post will guide you through the local environment setup for XM Cloud. You may refer this documentation to do this your own way. Althoug the documentation covers most of the setup, this blog post provides visual on the steps and errors with the resolution.
Once the Foundation Head from Sitecore Labs is forked s(se more details here) clone the copy to the local machine for creating a local instance required for XM Cloud development.
Pre-requisite –
You can find the pre-requisite in this documentation. Ensure your machine has this before setting the local development environment. Just noting down here-
Also make sure you are using Docker v.2, as explained here.
Access to XM Cloud – This blog post assumes you have admin access to XM Cloud where you should be able to craete/update/delete projects environments and deployment in your organisation.
I have this ready on my machine.
1. Clone the forked Foundation head repo.
I named the folder same as the repo on my local machine i.e. xmcloud-foundation-head. the same will be refered thoruhg this post.
Will see the following folder structure after cloned.
I use Visual Studio Code to make any environment related changes. You may use either Visual Studio 2022 or your choice of editor.
2. Open the .env at the root folder and you will see REPORTING_API_KEY, TELERIK_ENCRYPTION_KEY etc. empty.
3. Start the containers.
Prepare the environment
Before doing so make sure you stop the IIS and check if the port 443 (IIS Website) and 8984 (Solr service)is not used and the docker is running in Windows Containers mode. If not switch to Windows cotainers.
iisreset /stop
Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 443).OwningProcess
Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 8984).OwningProcess
Stop-Service -Name "<the name of your service>"
Copy the license file to c:\license folder. If you wish to have this in other folder you also have to change the HOST_LICENSE_FOLDER in .env(root folder) with the path where the license resides.
To prepare the Sitecore container environment, run the script init.ps1 from the root directory of the project along with the license path and desired passowrd for your instance. this form the root folder from the downloaded the repo.
You may also noticed .env in root folder have added values in REPORTING_API_KEY, TELERIK_ENCRYPTION_KEY and MEDIA_REQUEST_PROTECTION_SHARED_SECRET, which was earlier empty.
Download the Sitecore Docker images, install and configure the containers and client application
Run the up.ps1 to download and install containers and client application
.\up.ps1
This is should download the images and start the containers
Once the containers are started, it should ask to confirm to login to Sitecore with the Device confirmation code. Confirm if this matches. It should also ask to login to XM Cloud isntance and confirm.
One this is done indexes will be rebuilt and the Sitecore instance should be up and running.
Also notice that any items in this case none is pushed to Sitecore instance and an api key is genereated with the name xmcloudpreview-
You may also notice a jss editing secret and SITECORE_API_KEY_xmcloudpreview are updated in .env fiel in root folder along with the Sitecore Admin password which was set whilst initialising the environment.
The highlighted key shoulld match the key while spinning up the containers.
Taking down the containers
To take down the containers run the down.ps1 from the root folder.
.\down.ps1
Errors
Invoke-RestMethod : Unable to connect to the remote server
This should be ideally staright forward but if you see any issues whilst getting CM instance up and runing. take down the container with down.ps1 command and delete any docker network.
docker network prune
Hope this helps to setup local Sitecore instance for XM Cloud development.
With Zapier you can inspect and create customised workflow in munites without wirting any code. Its a good way to automate any actions required once the webhooks in Sitecore are triggered.
In this blog post will quickly create a workflow in Zapier to send mail when a webhook event is trigerred.
Will take a scenario when a Home page is updated, so that the concern team knows about this change.
This is not a fully customised solution but you can extend this as per your requirements.
Create a Zapier account
Create a Zapier account if you don’t have already. There is free subscription available to try out.
Login to Zapier and create a new Zap
Configure a trigger- Select Webhook by Zappier
When a new zap is created select a Catch Hook event in App & Event section
In the test section it should provide the URL its listening to execute any autmation if applicable.
Test the trigger by copying the s URL and setup the same in your Webhokk Handler in Sitecore XM CLoud or local instance. See this blog post on how to create a webhook handler.
Update content in Home page and Save. This should triggere the webhook and call the Zapier endpoint configured in handler.
Test trigger and should see the request available to this endpoint-
Continue with Selected Record if you are happy with the request-
Apply Filter
We want to send mail only when Home page is changed, so lets apply filter
Configure the filter
Add the condition
Further action will be taken only if Item name is Home. This just an example you can select the list of action available.
Continue and select next action and in this case I selected to send a mail to Gmail
Select the event “Send Mail”
Setup your account.
Setup the action to whom the mail should be sent and other information required for the mail
Continue and Test the Step
Now you should have the Zap configured-
Publish the Zap
Change the name of the Zap and should be available in Dashboard-
Change a home page content in Sitecore XM Cloud-
In the Zap runs you should be able to see a mail is triggered-
Thats it. This took me few minutes to configure and test the mail for a simple sceanrio.
Zapier gives you full flexibility to configure the triggers without writing any code based on the conditions to tak action when a Webhook event is triggered in Sitecore XM Cloud.
In the previous posts we saw how to setup the local environment or XM Cloud to debug Webhook handler event processing app i.e. web api using ngrok in this blog post and also checked how to configure the authorization using Auth0 by OKTA in this blog post using OAuth2ClientCredentialsGrant authorization.
Continuation to this we will now extend the Web Api to authorize the endpoint called from the Sitecore Webhook handler.
We already configured Auth0 to have API and Machine-to-Machine application we will configure this in Web API and setup the authorization.
The authorization in Web API will be done to check of the request cam from the valid domain i.e. dev-your_dev_id.uk.auth0.com and valid audience i.e. https://sc-xmcloud which should be part of the token.
Lets configure Web API .env file. Create a .env file and add the following-
CLIENT_ORIGIN_URL can aslo be your XM Cloud instance.
Sitecore Webhooks allows to receive real-time notification about events to the web api that can handle these requests.
In this blog post will see how to debug such handlers in local environment, events triggered by XM Cloud or from the local instance using ngrok.
What is ngrok?
ngrok allows to connect external netwroks in a consistent, secure and repeatable manner without changing any network configurations.
Pre-requisite-
Sitecore Instance-
Either have a local Sitecore instance or XM Cloud instance. See how to setup local XM Cloud instance
Create a Webhook Handler(Web Api)
For this blog post I have created a simple Web Api with a endpoint /api/item/handler which receives POST requests with a Item payload and just return OK or Badrequest response.
We are going to create a Webhook with item:saved event in Sitecore.
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
using Sitecore.Webhook.Handler.Models;
namespace Sitecore.Webhook.Handler.Controllers;
[ApiController]
[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class ItemController : Controller
{
[HttpPost("handler")]
public async Task<IActionResult> ItemHandler(ItemPayload? payLoad,
CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
if (payLoad == null)
{
return BadRequest();
}
// Process the item handler
return Ok();
}
}
When I run this from VS the endpoint listens on the port 7024 for me.
Host Name:- https://localhost:7024/
Endpoint: /api/item/handler
Install ngrok on dev machine
Use choclatey to install ngrok on local machine
choco install ngrok
Check the ngrok once installed
ngrok -v
IMP– Antivirus might block executing the ngrok. For me I had to turn off the real time scan. Do this at your own risk based on your antivirus software this might be different.
Execute ngrok http command to listen to the api endpoint-
This is first part for setting up the XM Cloud local environment. As a part of this we will first fork the foundation template from reporsitory. This will help you setup sitecore local instance and head your own copy without affecting the Foundation head from Sitecore labs. Note this repo keeps updating and the steps below may differ after any updates.
This post refers following documentation is you want to do your own way-
