Shipping custom logs from your v10 containers

My work on a container-based v10.0 project keeps raising interesting challenges – things that don’t work quite the same way in Docker or Kubernetes, compared to the old world of “bare metal” installs of Sitecore. Custom log files are an example here…

Sitecore containers and expired licenses

Sometimes you have a problem that you should absolutely have seen coming. The annual “the company’s Sitecore license has expired” fun is very much one of those things. But I’d not thought about this in advance, and the license expired while I was on holiday this year. It caused my team a load of hassle… But I have a plan to avoid this pain in the future:

Using ItemService in containers

I was asked to enable Sitecore’s ItemService endpoints on a containerised instance of Sitecore recently, and my first pass through this didn’t work. Turns out there’s a key bit of documentation that seems to be missing for this scenario. Hence a quick post to help get info into Google. So if you need to do this, read on:

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: