Handle ACL via Pom

In this blog, we are going to handle ACL via pom.xml of the project.

ACL available options:

• ignore
• overwrite
• merge
• merge_preserve
• clear

By default acls are installed in overwrite mode.

You can add any of the option in pom file. Below is the code for "merge" ACL option via pom:

Debugging in AEM and IDE

In this tutorial, we will first start AEM in debug mode and add remote debug connection in IDE(IntelliJ).

What is Debugging?

It is a systematic process of spotting and fixing the number of bugs, or defects, in a piece of software so that the software is behaving as expected. 

Debugging refers to identifying, analyzing, and removing errors. It is considered to be an extremely complex and tedious task because errors need to be resolved at all stages of debugging. 

When we work in IDE then we need to debug code to find or check what data is capturing.

We normally work on IntelliJ or Eclipse in the AEM project.

There are multiple ways to start AEM in debug mode.

Step 1: Add the Remote Debugging JVM Parameter

Start AEM with this JVM parameter

-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n

Another way to launch AEM instance in debug mode: 

Include it as a parameter when starting AEM with java -jar directly.

 java -Xmx512m -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=30303,server=y,suspend=n -jar cq-author-4502.jar

Another way to start AEM in debug mode, do changes in start.bat file for windows. 

For Windows Users

• Go to <AEM-Install>\crx-quickstart\bin
• Open start.bat file
• Go to line #25

You can see line content is:

if not defined CQ_JVM_OPTS set CQ_JVM_OPTS=-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Djava.awt.headless=true

Append below content to end of this line #25

You can see line content is:

if not defined CQ_JVM_OPTS set CQ_JVM_OPTS=-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Djava.awt.headless=true

Append below content to end of this line #25

-debug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=<port>

You can use the below line directly. I am using address 30303. You can map to any available port.

if not defined CQ_JVM_OPTS set CQ_JVM_OPTS=-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Djava.awt.headless=true -debug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=30303

• Save start.bat file.
• Start AEM now. Double click to start.bat to run your AEM instance.

For Mac users:

You can use the below line in start.sh directly in Mac OS. -z means zero length. for example, if [ -z "$CQ_JVM_OPTS" ]; then means if $CQ_JVM_OPTS is empty. 

if [ -z "$CQ_JVM_OPTS" ]; then
	CQ_JVM_OPTS='-server -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Djava.awt.headless=true -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=30303,server=y,suspend=n'
	...
fi

• Start AEM instance using start.sh on Mac OS.

The server is now running in debug mode.

Step 2: Debugging in IDE- IntelliJ

Open Project in IntelliJ Go to 

Run > Debug

After that below pop-up will appear

Click Edit Configurations.

The below screen will appear on clicking "Edit configurations".

Click "+" to add a new configuration. Select "Remote"

The below screen will appear on selecting Remote.

Enter below configurations:

Name: You can add any name. I want to debug on my local AEM author instance so I used localhost-author.

Host: IP address on which AEM instance is running. If it is running on the local machine then use "localhost".

Port: Enter port number on which you have configured debug address. In my case it is "

30303". You can refer #1 to check your debug port. I used below command to set up debug address:

if not defined CQ_JVM_OPTS set CQ_JVM_OPTS=-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -Djava.awt.headless=true -debug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=30303

Note: Command-line arguments automatically changed.

Module: Select module to debug. You can select any module for debugging or directly your project name. I have selected "Core" as my java classes are in the core module.

Click Apply and Debug.

Testing:

Select the java file which you want to debug.

Add a breakpoint to line

from UI, Hit the respective URL.

You can see, your file is in debug mode.

Congratulations!!! Your AEM instance is running in debug mode and can debug in IDE.

Integrating SOLR with Adobe Experience Manager 6.5

In this tutorial, we will integrate Apache Solr with AEM.

Introduction

Solr is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java, from the Apache Lucene project. Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open-source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. Solr is highly reliable, scalable, and fault-tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication, and load-balanced querying, automated fail-over and recovery, centralized configuration, and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

Major features:

• full-text search
• hit highlighting
• faceted search
• real-time indexing
• dynamic clustering
• database integration
• NoSQL features
• rich document handling.

Setup the Solr Server

Step 1: To install Solr server, you need to have Java 1.8 installed.  

Step 2: Download and install the Solr server (solr-6.2.0.zip ) from the following URL:

http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/

Step 3: Unzip the zip file.

Step 4: After unzipping file structure of solr seems like

Step 5: Go to the bin folder and run the below command to start the Solr server. 

solr start -e cloud -noprompt

Step 6: Once the server starts, you will see the message in the command prompt. Solr is started on 8983 port.

Step 7: Open the browser and verify the URL

http://localhost:8983/solr/#/

You can see solr web client.

Step 8: Download the code from GitHub. Unzip it some directory. You can directly clone this project. Follow below command:

git clone https://github.com/heenamadan/AemSolr2.git

Step 9: Go to the AemSolr2 folder and run below the maven command to deploy code.

Step 10: Now go to solr web client and create a collection:

This collection is for a single search index. Follow the below steps to create an index in solr.

From the web client, select Collection

Click Add Collection

provide the name of the collection "collection".

Choose the config list from dropdown. I am using gettingstarted.

You can provide a shard number according to your requirement. I am keeping it 1 at this moment.

You can provide a replication factor. By default, it is 1.

Click add a collection. You can see the collection is created.

There are a lot of options available like you can delete collection by clicking the "Delete" button or you can also create an alias. We are just creating collection as part of this article.

We are done at solr side. Now we will do some configurations at the AEM side.

Step 11: Configure AEM to Solr:

• Go to localhost:4502/system/console/bundles
• Select configuration from bundles tab
• Or directly go to link localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr

1) Search for "AEM Solr Search - Solr Configuration" service and enter the  following values:

    Protocol: http

    Solr Server Name: localhost

    Solr Server Port: 8983 (port number of your solr web client)

    Solr Core Name: collection ( references the collection you created)

    Content page path: /content/AemSolr2

Note: Provided code base(download from Github) has a content site structure under AemSolr2. You can provide any site structure path here for indexing. 

2) Search "Oak Solr remote" in configuration and check solr details. Check the port number of solr in the Solr HTTP URL. The rest is fine. Click Save.

3) Search "oak solr server provider" and select remote solr from the drop-down.

As our Solr is installed separately, It is not embedded so select "Remote Solr"

Now we are good to go!

Now create an index in Solr. For this, we have IndexContentToSolr java servlet which makes a connection to solr and creates an index.

For code brevity, this code example uses repository.loginAdministrative(null) method. This is used simply to keep the code shorter. If you are using this in Production, the recommended way is to create a system user and use the Sling Mapping Service. In order to run this example without creating system user, you can whitelist this call. It is not recommanded to use this. Please create appropriate system user and use sling mapping.

To Bypass login request, enable bypass. Go to configMgr Search "Sling Login Admin whitelist" and click the checkbox and save. ( for testing purpose only)

 

 

 For UI, I have created a basic component that is used to create indexing and delete indexing. Open http://localhost:4502/apps/AemSolr2/solr-index/components/content/solr-config.html

Click the "Index Pages" button. The default value is already populated to the text field which is "indexpages". Pages are successfully indexed.

Response Message: "Response is successfully indexed pages to solr server".

Index creation is done on the properties that you specified in your java file. For example, we did on below properties only. It will do indexing on id, title, etc. properties that we have added to create an index if present in page properties.

Check solr web client to check indexes. Click collection Selection drop down from the left panel and select your collection name. In our case, it is "collection"

Now Select Query from the left panel and click execute a query. 

All indexed pages appear as a result.

You can see the results. We have 3 pages and all got indexed with properties on which we have applied indexing.

Or you can check by directly going through this link and click execute the query.

View Solr results in AEM

In the codebase, we have a component named "solrsearch". Go to  /apps/AemSolr2/components/content/solrsearch to see component details.

Add below lines on top of the HTML file of /apps/AemSolr2/components/content/solrsearch/solrsearch.html

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.0.js" integrity="sha256-slogkvB1K3VOkzAI8QITxV3VzpOnkeNVsKvtkYLMjfk=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>  

I have already added this line to my component.

Now open any page for eg. http://localhost:4502/editor.html/content/AemSolr2/en.html. Click to drag component. You will see the "+" icon to add a component. 

Search the "Solr Search" and Add component.

Open in preview/publish view.

Now search with the title of the page. for eg: "heena"

Below is the result.

Search with "Francais" below is the result.

Now I am searching with id-"en". It shows the result.

It searched with "like" operator. So you type complete id "/content/AemSolr2/en.html" then it will show all results which have the same pattern.

Now I am trying with a random string that is not indexed.

Congratulations!!

Search is working in AEM with apache solr.👍

You can search in apache solr to check the result is the same as AEM search or not.

Go to solr web client and in the query enter title/id etc. on which you want to apply search and click execute the search. Let's search for "English" and the only title which has "English" keyword has appeared as a result.

Enter "English" in q place which is query string place.

You can delete the index that you have created earlier. Click "Delete index" to the component and you are done.

Index Deleted in Solr web server.

Stop the Solr server. Go to the bin folder of Solr and Run solr stop -all command.

Dispatcher Set up in AEM on Windows

Set up Dispatcher in AEM on Windows

In this tutorial, i am going to take you through how to set up a dispatcher in AEM on windows.

What is Dispatcher?

Dispatcher is Adobe Experience Manager's caching and/or load balancing tool. Dispatcher also helps to protect your AEM server from attack.

The Dispatcher helps realize an environment i.e. both fast and dynamic. It works as a part of a static HTML server, with the aim of:

• Storing as much of the site content as is possible, in the form of a static website.
• Accessing the layout as little as possible.

You need an Apache server to run Dispatcher. So first we need to set up the Apache server then we will add configuration of the dispatcher.

 

Install Apache Webserver on Windows:

Download Apache server from the trusted Apache site. Follow below link:

 http://archive.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/

A lot of new versions are available for Apache. I am using apache server 2.2.  Follow the below steps to set up on windows:

Step 1: Download httpd-2.2.25-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi

Step 2: Double click the downloaded msi file and click next and finish

By default, it will install at C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2

Apache location 

Step 3: Go to your httpd.conf file C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf

·       Change default Define SRVROOT or ServerRoot path to absolute path of your apache2.2 folder “ C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf” (Line – 38).

·      Update listen port Listen 8080 (Line – 47), it is optional if you don’t want to change you can keep default port as 80.

 

·       Update ServerName localhost:8080 (Line – 173), it is optional if you don’t want to change you can keep default port as 80.

 

·       Now Go to the bin folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin) and open command prompt.

·       run httpd -k start to start the server.

#Common Issue while starting the server

If it says the port is already bound to 80 port on 0.0.0.1:80 then change port in httpd.conf file.

Then change the port. Let’s say I am changing to port 81. Change port at line #47 and save it.

Step 4: Run httpd -k start command to start the apache server.

Check error.log in the logs folder of C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software 

Foundation\Apache2.2\logs.

If no error then opens a browser and type localhost. It shows it works!

You can change this content. For this:

• Go to C:\Program Files(x86)\ApacheSoftwareFoundation\Apache2.2\htdocs
• Open Index.html file.

        

• Save this file and refresh the browser. You can see Updated content.

        

Step 5:  Now set up dispatcher on apache server.

 You just need to follow below steps:-

·       Download dispatcher build

·       Modify Apache web server httpd.conf file

·       Modify dispatcher.any file

·       Restart Apache web server and you are done.

 Download dispatcher build:

Go to below link:

https://www.adobeaemcloud.com/content/companies/public/adobe/dispatcher/dispatcher.html

Download the selected file. I am selecting no ssl.

Unzip dispatcher-apache2.2-windows-x86-4.2.3.zip file

Note# Its better to use the same version for both dispatcher and apache. I am using 2.2 for both. if you are working with 2.4 apache and 2.2 dispatcher then you might face some issue.

It contains below files:

§  disp_apache2.2.dll – This is my dispatcher module file, which we will     plugin with web server.

 

§  dispatcher.any – It is our dispatcher configuration file.

§  author_dispatcher.any – Sample file for configuring our dispatcher.

§  httpd.conf.disp2.conf – sample file to configure apache webserver.

 Now follow the below steps to configure dispatcher:

• Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf location where you have installed your apache server.

•  Open httpd.conf file.

•  Go to path where you have unzipped dispatcher. 

• Open httpd.conf.disp2 file.

•  Go to line #234

•  Copy LoadModule dispatcher_module  modules/mod_dispatcher.so and paste anywhere in httpd.conf file 

    I am pasting line #130 where my load modules are ending.

 Change module "mod_dispacther.so" to modules/disp_apache2.2.dll as   dispatcher has .dll file.

 

Note:-This setting is used by apache webserver to load my dispatcher when next time Apache web server is started

Copy line #236-248 from httpd.conf.disp2.conf  file and paste it to httpd.conf file after ending of </IfModule>.

Below are the lines, you can use it directly.

<IfModule disp_apache2.c>

 

    # location of the configuration file. eg: 'conf/dispatcher.any'

    DispatcherConfig conf/dispatcher.any

   

    # location of the dispatcher log file. eg: 'logs/dispatcher.log'

    DispatcherLog    logs/dispatcher.log

   

    # log level for the dispatcher log, can be either specified

    # as a string or an integer (in parentheses)

    # error(0): Errors

    # warn(1):  Warnings

    # info(2):  Infos

    # debug(3): Debug

    # trace(4): Trace

    DispatcherLogLevel warn

   

    # if turned on, the dispatcher looks like a normal module

    DispatcherNoServerHeader Off

   

    # if turned on, request to / are not handled by the dispatcher

    # use the mod_alias then for the correct mapping

    DispatcherDeclineRoot Off

   

    # if turned on, the dispatcher uses the URL already processed

    # by handlers preceeding the dispatcher (i.e. mod_rewrite)

    # instead of the original one passed to the web server.

    DispatcherUseProcessedURL Off

   

    # if turned to 1, the dispatcher does not spool an error

    # response to the client (where the status code is greater

    # or equal than 400), but passes the status code to

    # Apache, which e.g. allows an ErrorDocument directive

    # to process such a status code.

    #

    # Additionally, one can specify the status code ranges that should

    # be left to web server to handle, e.g.

    #

    # DispatcherPassError 400-404,501

    DispatcherPassError 0

 

    #

    # DispatcherKeepAliveTimeout specifies the number of seconds a

    # connection to a backend should be kept alive. If not set or

    # set to zero, connections are not kept alive.

    #

    #DispatcherKeepAliveTimeout 60

 

</IfModule>

It contains below entries:

·          DispatcherConfig – location of the configuration file

·          DispatcherLog– location of the dispatcher log file

·          DispatcherPassError – to use your dispatcher for handling errors, if set to 1 then webserver will handle errors.

·         DispatcherKeepAliveTimeout – Time interval for which your request should be kept alive.

Now copy the dispatcher handler from httpd.conf.disp2.conf (line #370) to httpd.conf file(line #238). this will override the default handle of web server and allow the dispatcher to entertain all incoming requests. 

Add below code:

 <Directory />

 <IfModule disp_apache2.c>

 ModMimeUsePathInfo On

 # enable dispatcher for ALL request. if this is too restrictive,

 # move it to another location

 SetHandler dispatcher-handler

 </IfModule>

 Options FollowSymLinks

 AllowOverride None

</Directory>

 It might present in your httpd.conf. If it is there, then ignore the above step.

 

      Copy this disp_apache2.2.dll  file from downloaded dispatcher and paste it under C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\modules.

 

   Copy dispatcher.any file from downloaded dispatcher and paste it under C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf directory.

 Now open dispatcher.any file.

• Change the port number in line 38. If you are setting up dispatcher for publish instance then use 4503 (default port of publish) or add your publish port here if not 4503.

•  If you want to set up for author then set it 4502.

 

 

• Then go to line #77

•  Allow all paths for the author. Instead of denying, I am allowing this for testing purposes.

§     For Publish the instance you should deny all request and allow specific, For an author instance you should allow all and deny specific.

     Then go to /cache section.

§  Update cache Doc Root. It should exactly match my httpd.conf Documentroot path. Copy Document root path from httpd.conf file and paste it in dispatcher.any file at line 132.

 

§  Save all settings and Restart your Apache Web server.

httpd -k start

 

Test Dispatcher Installation:-

To test whether the dispatcher is configured properly or not. Check logs in your directory. You will find dispacther.log in the logs folder

 

Now open localhost:81 to your browser.

 

 

 

  

You will see, AEM instance is working on apache. I set up for the author. You can set port 4503 to publish.

Check http://localhost:81/editor.html/content/we-retail/us/en.html is working for you.

 

 

Congratulations!!!  Your dispatcher is set up now.

 If you want to add rewrite rules and test then follow below steps:

• Add below lines just before end of this <IfModule disp_apache2.c> tag in httpd.conf file.

        RewriteEngine on

        RewriteRule ^/$ /content/we-retail.html [R]

•  And uncomment line 119 which is:

         LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

 Now Stop and restart your apache server.

 Type localhost:81 to your browser.

 It will redirect to we retail page. Because we set up a rule for we-retail page

RewriteRule ^/$ /content/we-retail.html [R] while setting up rules. So when you 

hit loclahost:81 then it will automatically go to http://localhost:81/content/we-

retail.html

 

Congratulations!!! Your rules also working now👍