Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I quite often clone Sitecore's Docker Examples repo and spin up a Sitecore instance to experiment with. It's a quick way to create a disposable site which I can easily configure and deploy little bits of test code to. But recently I did this and noticed some odd warnings. So here's what happened and why, to help you avoid the same issue...
There are some days when technology just doesn't want to play ball. And in my experience 99% of these days are when you're on a developer training course and its the exercise/labs machine that's being difficult. I had this recently on the XM Cloud developer intro course. I've no idea if anyone else would ever see this issue (or how it was caused) but it didn't return much useful info in Google, and I did find a way to fix for my problem. So it's documentation time...
Sometimes things you think you know turn out not to be right. I got bitten by this issue recently, and it seemed like something to write down. Because being wrong is fine, as long as you learn something...
I had another "things work differently in containers" moment recently. One of the fun points of changing the approach to your deployments is that sometimes you have to look differently at how some core configuration issues too. And this seems like an issue others will encounter too:
To customise a very old joke, there are only two difficult issues in IT: Naming things, Time calculations, and off-by-one errors. And adding containers into the mix raises even more fun. I recently hit an issue where containerised Sitecore needed to use a different time zone to the physical servers it was hosted on. So what can be done to configure this? Here's two things that can help:
A while back I wrote up some notes on a problem some people were seeing with Sitecore's SolrCloud developer container that I'd been unable to fix. It was the worst sort of technical problem, happening irregularly on some computers, but never rearing its head on others. So it's taken me a while to get around to coming up with a fix for this. But if you've suffered from the problems described in my previous post, this is an option for you:
Most of the time when I want to explore the filesystem of a Sitecore container, it's pretty easy. I can use Visual Studio's container browser. But that only works when a container is running - and if it's based on a job image this may be a very brief window - too brief to find and explore the file in question. So what can I do?
The other day my copy of Docker Desktop on two different work laptops prompted me to update. And neither would work properly after the update completed. In case this issue is affecting others, here's the saga of what I saw and two ways it can be fixed:
Usually with these blog posts, I find a problem, I fight with it for a bit, and then I solve the problem. But this post has been sitting half-written in my publishing queue since May (!) this year, and I have entirely failed to solve this issue. So I'm admitting defeat, and publishing this anyway because maybe one of you knows the answer. Or at least it might serve as a warning...
My issue is that I've been working through some really odd and annoying Solr issues which only manifest in Docker on one laptop. I'm really not sure if these are issues that others might see, or if this is a problem that's entirely down to this laptop's setup. But they're definitely a problem...
One thing we don't seem to be short of these days is options for deploying Solr. I've had to do a bit of thinking about this recently, as I draw up plans for a work project. So I figured I'd write a bit of it down because if I'm having to explain it to people, then chances are there are plenty of others out there in Internet Land who are finding themselves having to think about these issues too:
