AEM & Docker getting started guide

Getting started guide for development with Adobe Experience Manager together with Docker. The configuration contains an AEM author, publisher and dispatcher environment, running in three separate containers. Docker images also have support for installing AEM packages during build.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes running on a Mac. Installation on Windows might differ for certain steps. The following items are required:

• Docker with at least 8GB memory allocated
• AEM installation file, named AEM_6.2_Quickstart.jar or AEM_6.3_Quickstart.jar (other versions might work, but are not tested)
• AEM license file, named license.properties
• Oak runnable jar named oak-run-*.jar, where the * contains the version number. Make sure the Oak version is compatible with the AEM version.
• Recommended: Homebrew package manager

Getting started: running AEM

1. Clone this repository to a local directory and put the AEM installation file, license file and Oak runnable jar file in the root.
2. Put AEM packages that need to be installed during build in ./author/packages/ and ./publisher/packages/. Order of installation will be alphabetically, based on package file name.
3. Build the Docker images with docker build -t aem-base -f base/Dockerfile . && docker-compose build. This takes a couple of minutes (or more, depending on the number of packages), as the author and publisher are started during build to be able to install packages.
4. Start the Docker containers with docker-compose up. This will also mount the ./logs directory on your local system to the containers, so you have easy access to the logs of all containers.
5. Wait until AEM has fully started. To check for the author, open the bundles page and when all bundle statusses are either Active or Fragment the AEM environment has fully started.
6. Navigate to http://localhost:4502 and you'll see a login screen. Login with username admin and password admin. Navigate to http://localhost to see the published site via the dispatcher. The publisher runs on http://localhost:4503.

Starting and stopping containers preserves AEM content. Images need to be rebuild when changing packages in the packages directories. After stopping a container, or after a system reboot, you can be quickly up-and-running again by starting the containers with docker-compose up.

Getting started: set-up development environment

1. Install Java 8 SDK: brew cask install java8.
2. Install Maven: brew install maven.
3. Download and install IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains or install with brew cask install caskroom/cask/intellij-idea-ce.
4. Clone the AEM We.Retail sample repository to a local directory.
5. Open the folder with the AEM We.Retail sample in IntelliJ. In IntelliJ, click on the right-top corner on the dropdown and select Edit Configurations. Add a New Configuration with the plus-icon on the top-left corner, select Maven. Set the name as Deploy author, set the working directory as aem-sample-we-retail, command line clean install -e and profiles autoInstallPackage. Now save the configuration.
6. Click on the play button on the top-right corner to run the Deploy author configuration. You might get an error that the Java JDK can't be found: Project JDK is not specified. When this occurs, click on Configure next to the error and specify the location of your Java SDK (for instance, /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_162.jdk/). Now try again to run the Deploy author configuration and you should see a success message.
7. Navigate to the AEM Package Manager and you should see the we.retail.* packages on top of the list.

Other tools

• aem-front can be used to significantly speed-up your AEM front-end development workflow, as code changes will hot-reload in your browser.

Credits

Inspiration and code examples are taken from the following projects:

• https://github.com/AdobeAtAdobe/aem_6-1_docker
• https://hub.docker.com/r/ggotti/aem-base
• https://github.com/adfinis-sygroup/aem-docker