Part 2: Sitecore Content Serialization Configuration(Sitecore CLI)

After this, you will get following folders and files:

.sitecore folder will have schemas and user.json file.

schemas folder contains three schemas:

• ModuleFile schema for each module configuration (<module name>.module.json)
• RootConfiguration required in setting up sitecore.json
• UserConfiguration schema used in user.json when we login into sitecore instance with interactive or non-interactive flow.

User.json saves the login information once the user logged in successfully via interactive or non-interactive flow. Do not commit this file in source control.

Configure sitecore.json

This file will be common to the project. We can configure following information in sitecore.json.

• RootConfigurationFile.schema.json schema is added at the top
• Modules: Add path of module or you can add a wildcard as given above to include all modules by itself based on architecture of project.
• Plugins: plugins installed in this for serialization, index, publish, resource packaging and database are added here.
• Serialization: It contains information about allowed max relative path length, module relative serialization path(where item ymls will be created), should it continue if serialization fails at some item, what fields need be excluded, etc.

There are several fields on items which do not contain important information and not required to be serialized. So you can add an array of the excluded fields with two properties: fieldId and description to Exclude property.

For Example:

"excludedFields": [
      {
        "fieldId": "badd9cf9-53e0-4d0c-bcc0-2d784c282f6a",
        "description": "__Updated by"
      }
]

NOTE:

-Excluding Revision fields from serialization can result in issues when publishing with the serialization command.
-You can also mention excluded fields in specific *module.json files to exclude from particular module items only.

Settings: It contains boolean entries to enable/disable telemetry and to enable the feature to check the Sitecore management services version compatibility.

Configure <module name>.module.json

• Create module file with <module name>.module.json.
• Add the Module schema at the top.

Update the path as per location of file.

• After schema, add following:

{
  "namespace": "",
  "references": [""],
  "items": ""
}

• In items property, mention sitecore item’s include paths to sync items, descendants, children, etc. as given below:

items:"
"includes": [
        {
          "name": "<name>",
          "path": "<sitecore item path>",
          "scope": "<scope>",
          "allowedPushOperations": "<allowedPushOperations>"
          "rules": [
                    {
                        "path": "<sitecore item path>",
                        "scope": "<scope>"
                    }
        }
]"

Details about include properties:

• Order of the include paths is important. For example: templates, layouts, renderings, should be added first in include path list to avoid conflicts while syncing content items due to dependency on templates, layouts, etc.

• You can also create a separate Base.module.json file for base items like templates, branches etc. and the add it as references(refer below code snippet) in rest of files. So in this way, we can order include paths inside the *.module.json and also set the hierarchy in which all module files need to be serialized.

• You can set the relative path at the module level(refer below code snippet) inside items. This will override the defaultModuleRelativeSerializationPath given in sitecore.json.

• You can also set the different exclude fields in different modules rather than setting same exclude fields for all modules.

...
items": {
        "includes": [
            {
                "name": "Apikey",
                "path": "/sitecore/system/Settings/Services/API Keys"
            },
            {
                "name": "Media",
                "path": "/sitecore/media library/my-first-jss-app"
            }
        ],
        "excludedFields":[
            {
	          "fieldID": "{EB504D1B-B612-4FFF-B239CA3BD7273D1B}",
		  "description": "FieldsForExclude1"
	    },
            {
		  "fieldID": "{3C2C061E-F61F-4DF6-89EA-0B7A56348737}",
		  "description": "FieldsForExclude2"
	     }
        ]
    }

• Like the include paths of content items, you can exclude certain set of items with rules along with each include path. For example:

"items": {
  "includes": [
    {
      "name": "content",
      "path": "/sitecore/content/home",
      "rules": [
        {
           "path": "/products/legacy",
           "scope": "ignored"
        },
        {
           "path": "/products",
           "scope": "ItemAndDescendants",
           "allowedPushOperations": "createUpdateAndDelete"
        },
        {
           "path": "*",
           "scope": "ignored"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Details about rule properties:

NOTE:

- Scope: Ignored, is only valid in configuring rules
- Sitecore CLI does not support duplicate item names and will break push/pull operations

• In the initial serialization, you will require to sync everything. However, in proceeding serialization, you may require to serialize a module or couple of modules. You can mention tags in the individual module files and then use those tags with push and pull commands to sync more targeted changes rather than to sync all

Pull command with tags:

dotnet sitecore ser pull --include tags:[global-208]

• You can also serialize role by adding roles property in module.json. The roles property is an array that consists of role predicate items with two properties: domain (Sitecore role domain) and pattern (a regex pattern to determine specific roles to include under the domain). For example:

{
    ...
    "items": {
        ...
    },
    "roles": [
      {
        "domain": "sitecore",
        "pattern": "Developer"
      },
      {
        "domain": "custom",
        "pattern": "Role*"
      },
      {
        "domain": "extranet",
        "pattern": "^MySite.*$"
      }
    ]
}