Each of my scaled environments will have at least two publishing targets. Yes, you can use Sitecore's preview tools, but this has its limitations. After decades of working with marketing teams I can say it's always a good idea to have a private URL, only available to the company, where they can review pending changes for an upcoming campaign etc., without having to log in.

One of the most used installations from Sitecore is the Single Developer instance, where Sitecore, Identity Server and xConnect will serve to localhost. This is convenient, but in a team environment we want other developers to access our VM if we need to collaborate, troubleshoot, etc. So how do we get here? There are some post-installation steps needed, and I'll list them in this step-by-step guide.

One of the prerequisites for a Sitecore installation is Solr. I'm excessively lazy, so having a script to do the complete installation for me is something I'm going to keep around. Today we'll install Solr in 2 simple steps!

Our typical scaled Sitecore environments will consist of anywhere between 4-6 instances, depending on pre or post version 9, so being able to automate updates to them certainly saves a lot of time. The time required to perform a conventional package installation and to extract the updated files and drop them into delivery instances becomes costly over many months for larger engagements, so using the tools we have available to us is a necessity. Today I'm going to provide a complete guide for setting this up using HedgeHog TDS and Azure Devops.

When setting up a greenfield project I just love to see the sea of standard Sitecore home pages cascaded across my monitors as every instance in every environment comes online. I feel like Tom Hanks yelling, “Look what I have created!”, and after the first 20 times of doing so in the office I got “The talk”. But it's not unusual to see a slow start which typically boils down to a connection or permission error. This can be quickly identified and dealt with by just checking the logs, and performance counters is no stranger to this exercise.