Getting started with XM Cloud(Local)

In this blog, I will give a walkthrough how to setup local XM cloud development environment.

Pre requisites:

A valid Sitecore license file
Windows PowerShell 5.1. (PowerShell 7 is not supported at this time)
The current long-term support (LTS) version of Node.js
.NET Core 6.0 SDK
.NET Framework 4.8 SDK
Visual Studio 2022
Docker for Windows, with Windows Containers enabled(Make sure you have all components for running containers/docker)

Prepare Local Environment to run containers:

Open Powershell in admin mode.

Make sure that Internet Information not running at port 443:

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 443).OwningProcess

If you found any, stop IIS:

iisreset /stop

Check if you have Apache Solr or any other service running on port 8984:

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 8984).OwningProcess

If yes, stop it:

Stop-Service -Name "<the name of your service>"

nssm stop "<the name of your service>"

Set up the XM cloud development solution

The starter template has scripts for following:

Clone the repository you configured for the XM Cloud project and open powershell in admin mode in same folder and run below commands:

Prepare the Sitecore Container environment:

.\init.ps1 -InitEnv -LicenseXmlPath "<C:\path\to\license.xml>" -AdminPassword "<desired password>"

Restart terminal or VS code after this as instructed.

Now, run up.ps1 to download the Sitecore Docker images, install and configure the containers and client application

.\up.ps1

Do as instructed in your browser while running this script, log in to the Sitecore XM instance and accept the device authorization.

Following screenshot has the images created:

The starter XM cloud template is just empty instance

Now, Configure Item serialization to synchronize items between environments

Create a serialization json file under /src for syncing templates, renderings, content items, media items etc. Follow the below syntax:

{
  "name": "<name of type of data>",
  "path": "<sitecore item path>",
  "allowedPushOperations": "CreateUpdateAndDelete"
}

I created a Headless site and configured content tree, media, templates in *.module.json file for serialization.

In order to serialize items, execute the following:

Authorize the local project in your XM Cloud organization

dotnet sitecore cloud login

Do as instructed to log in, authorize your device and all this connectivity information is stored in the .sitecore/user.json file.

Connect to the local environment

dotnet sitecore connect --ref xmcloud --cm https://xmcloudcm.localhost --allow-write true -n local

To pull serialized items from the remote XM Cloud environment

dotnet sitecore ser pull -n "local"

To push the serialized items into your locally running XM instance

dotnet sitecore ser push -n "local"

Configure the editing host

After this, you are all set to use your local XM cloud environment. In this next blog, we will connect this local environment with remote environment.