19Oct, 2020
The Complete Guide to Installing Habitat Home Corporate on Sitecore 9.2
Habitat is a great demo instance that has been used to showcase what Sitecore can do. I'm grateful for this tool since we can spin up a copy quickly to use during project initialization phases where people new to Sitecore can quickly get familiar with it. Installation can be tricky, so I'll cover the steps and some hiccups I've come across.
Prerequisites
You'll need is a base installation of Sitecore 9.2, which I've covered in this earlier post. Since Habitat will want to use SSL, you need to bind the main site to 443 and install a certificate for it. Once this is complete and you can validate the site is accessible over SSL, you're ready to start.
Steps to Install
The first thing you need is Habitat Home Corporate, which you want to download and extract to C: \projects\Sitecore.HabitatHome.Corporate on the same server Sitecore is running. This is the default location specified in the cake-config.json file from the package, which specifies a number of variables that must be reviewed in the following steps.
Next, open the cake-config.json file. You must alter the first three lines to match your Sitecore installation.
{
"WebsiteRoot": "C:\\Inetpub\\wwwroot\\habitathomecorporate.dev.local",
"XConnectRoot": "C:\\Inetpub\\wwwroot\\habitathomecorporate_xconnect.dev.local\\",
"InstanceHostname": "habitathomecorporate.dev.local",
"InstanceProtocol": "https",
"SolutionName": "HabitatHome.Corporate.sln",
"ProjectFolder": "C:\\projects\\Sitecore.HabitatHome.Corporate",
"BuildConfiguration": "Local", "BuildToolVersions": "VS2017",
"RunCleanBuilds": false,
"MessageStatisticsApiKey": "97CC4FC13A814081BF6961A3E2128C5B",
"MarketingDefinitionsApiKey": "DF7D20E837254C6FBFA2B854C295CB61",
"DeployExmTimeout": 60,
"DeploymentTarget": "Local",
"version": "9.2.0",
"CDN": "false"
}
Finally, open PowerShell as an Administrator, change to the ProjectFolder and execute .\build (Ignore the fact my extracted folder is "install"):
Once complete, you should see the confirmation below:
Visit your local instance to see the Habitat Corporate site, which was published automatically for you.
+
Potential Issues
I had a few hiccups which was mostly due to the fact this was a vanilla installation of Server 2016.
- Missing .NET 4.7.1.
- Missing vs_buildtools.exe, which automatically installed after I opened the Habitat solution in Visual Studio.
- Insufficient permissions to write to the ProjectFolder.
Once these were squared away the installation was a simple process.
