Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Getting back to the the issue of installing things for a Sitecore development environment, this week I'm going to start tackling how you can add "Coveo for Sitecore" to a machine. While Coveo have provided some documentation on how this can be achieved, (for CES and REST APIs) they make they point that they don't offer support for this approach to installation. So this may not be right for everyone. But in case it's of use to you, here's the first part of my attempt at the automation:
Having been working on more automation with PowerShell DSC in the last week, I hit upon an interesting issue. For many operations, it doesn't really matter what user your script is executing as. Most local operations that only affect the current machine just work. However, every so often you come across an operation that you need to perform as a specific user. So how can you impersonate a different user for parts of your scripts?
In the past I've often renamed the default site entry from "website" to something more meaningful when creating the configuration for a project. If your instance of Sitecore is serving multiple websites, then it seems logical to me to name your site entries so they make sense against the purposes of these websites. However it seems that in the current version of Sitecore 8.0 this is a bad idea...
So, finally, we've got the prerequisites (Windows,
Mongo,
SQL) out of the way, we can get to installing Sitecore in this post. There are a load of ways of going about this, but my usual choice is automating the Sitecore
.exe
installer. Doing this via DSC gives you the basis of an installation which can be used across all your platforms. The process below is based on the approach I've used with ordinary PowerShell in the past, but adapted for DSC:
After MongoDB last week, next on my list of stuff we might want to automate in our dev environments is SQL Server. There's a good story around automating installs here, as Microsoft have supported this for some time. And there's also a good story around installing it via DSC. I've taken most of my inspiration from this blog post, and pulled it into the install framework I've been working on. Thanks to Colin Dembovsky for his work here – as there wasn't that much that I found I needed to change to get everything working for me.
