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…

Attaching a debugger to Sitecore in Docker

The approach I read on how to “how to attach your debugger to Sitecore inside Docker” by running “docker inspect” to fetch the current IP address, and pasting it into Visual Studio can be a bit of a faff. So I got to wondering: Are there other ways to achieve the same result?

Docker and LinkManager playing nicely…

Having started down the Docker road, I hit an interesting issue the other day. How do you get Sitecore to generate absolute links correctly when your site runs inside a container?

Building Docker images for older versions of Sitecore

There’s been a lot of movement towards “Docker for Sitecore” over the last year – to the extent that even I have finally jumped onto the bandwagon. And with any new tech, there are some rough edges to contend with. Right now (for me at least) one of those is being able to get the right Docker images built for the bit of work you need to do. In the future (crosses fingers) we’ll see Sitecore offering a repo for these images – but for now it’s up to us to build our own. So if you need something that’s not v9.3, here’s what I did to get there: