v10.1’s new database update strategy

One of the interesting things that’s arrived with Sitecore v10.1 is a new approach to how items get updated when you change versions. This change is aimed at containerised deployments, and I’m in the middle of a containerised project. So I figured I should take a look…

More learning about Kubernetes for Sitecore

Last time out I was thinking about some choices around setting up Sitecore in Kubernetes. Since then, I’ve moved onto the more practical task of trying to get the setup to work. And I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that I’ve met a few new issues… Maybe they’ll help you save yourself a bit of time and frustration?

Kubernetes and Sitecore: Some questions I’ve been pondering…

I’m in the middle of trying to plan out the transition of a Sitecore 10 development project from PaaS deployments, over to the Azure Kubernetes Service. There’s some great info out there, but there have also been some interesting things I’ve wondered about that seem less documented right now. So here are some things I’ve learned this week:

Deploying Dianoga in developer containers

I bumped into an interesting issue recently, which I though others might come across. Trying to run a project with Dianoga in it didn’t work properly in a developer’s Docker container – it kept failing whenever it was asked to process an SVG image. Why didn’t that work? Here’s why:

Sitecore snuck in Content Security Policy!

Ages ago I wrote up a bit about how your public sites should consider implementing Content Security Policy because of all the hacks it can prevent. In a bit of frustrating irony, I was tripped up by a problem caused precisely because Sitecore have added some CSP headers to their own code. Google came up empty on this, so I’m documenting it for the next person who gets bitten.

SolrCloud with Sitecore 10

A while back I wrote about some initial investigations I’d made towards having SolrCloud in a containerised Sitecore instance. Since I worked on that, Sitecore have shipped their “official” container approach, so I’ve revisited my experiments using the examples Sitecore provides.

What’s interested me in Sitecore’s use of Docker

Now that Sitecore 10 is out, I’ve been having a dig into the new Docker approach that’s been released. There are some interesting differences here between Sitecore’s official approach and the way the community scripts I’d experimented with worked – and I’ve learned a few interesting new things as a result of having a read of the examples provided. Here are the things that caught my attention:

Experimenting with a SolrCloud container for Sitecore

I’ve got a project on the cards that I’d like to use docker containers for, but we’re talking about using SolrCloud for search. Right now, there isn’t a SolrCloud container in the Sitecore community container repo. So I started thinking about what would it take to make one.

Usergroup: Developing Sitecore code under Docker

I presented a session at the London and Manchester user groups recently, where I talked about what I needed to do in order to get started developing Sitecore code under Docker.

Making an “XP without analytics” Docker image for Sitecore

One of the minor annoyances of some XM releases of Sitecore is that rather than just disabling analytics and not running xConnect, they do not include the DLLs necessary for personalisation at all. That can be a bit of a pain sometimes – as I discovered recently when I tried to deploy some client code into an XM docker container. The site broke because the client code included references to a personalisation DLL – which made me realise I actually wanted an “XP in XM mode” container so I didn’t need to bother with the memory and CPU for xConnect. So here’s how I hacked one up…