Manage SDL Microservice using Jenkins

As a developer, if have the access to servers, to monitor, start/stop, reading logs of SDL Microservice your life is very easy, but when we work in a cage environment and you don't have access to servers due to policies or your client has to follow certain standards such as "PCI" and stuff like that as a DEV you don't get the direct access on those machines.

Using Powershell, Yes we can do that, but what will happen when you don't have the permission to run Powershell as well and I worked on a project where, as a developer, I didn’t have the permission to run Powershell as well.

Well, In that case, we ask the DevOps to do this job for us because they are the one having all the access, but this could be a time-consuming process as well, log a ticket and then someone from DevOps address that and as a developer, we might be required to start/stop and see logs of Microservice multiple times.

There is another scenario where you have your content delivery on the Linux box, not all your developers are very familiar with the Linux commands. 

As a best practice, we should always use proper tools in such a scenario, and today we will see how we can configure Jenkins to start/stop/restart SDL Microservices.

Installing Jenkins is really quick and it takes very less time to configure it.

1. Download Jenkins.
2. Open up a terminal in the download directory.
3. Run java -jar jenkins.war --httpPort=8080. Refer screenshot 1
4. Browse to http://localhost:8080.
5. Follow the instructions to complete the installation.

Run the Jenkins.war

Jenkins is installed successfully and We have the initial password to login 

Next is let's configure the Jenkins

Hit the URL in the http://localhost:8080 this is the default port on which Jenkins runs you can change that. It will ask you the first time login secret key.

Initial password 

Next is select the defaults option to configure the Jenkins

Default feature

You can always install other plugins as well from the Manage Jenkins section

Once everything is configured you will see this screen

Jenkins is ready!!

Next is create a job that will start/stop/restart the SDL microservice

Click on create new job

I have created the following three jobs to stop/start and restart Tridion microservice using  Powershell commands we can sh commands in case of LINUX.

Tridion Services

Console output of Restart Deployer Service

Output

For monitoring the health and traffic on the machine we can use Jenkins Monitoring feature.
Go to:- http://localhost:8080/monitoring

Here you will get the necessary information related to the system health using Jenkins,  you can always use any other tool to do this.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!!

Extending Storage Type in SDL Tridion DOCS 2013 SP2

Recently, I got the opportunity to explore and work on SDL Tridion Docs 2013 SP2 where I need to develop an extension. The client is using their own ElasticSearch instance and wants us to continue using the same instance to index DOCS data in it.

To start with I first explored the SDL DOCS documentation to understand if at all storage extension is supported or not and yes Extension is available not just storage but you can extend the Deployer as well :). "Maybe in the next blog".

After, spending some time on Documentation I was clear what I need to do in order to extend the storage type.

For the initial steps "How to set up the JAVA project and generate custom.JAR" you can follow my previous blogs. In SDL Tridion DOCS, we have the following Content Delivery roles and with that data is published into UDP (Unified Delivery Platform).

• Discovery Service
• Content Service
• Context Service
• IQ Service for Indexing and Querying data In/From Elastic
• Contextual Image Delivery
• UGC Service

Coming back, to Extending the Storage we need to configure the Deployer, here we need to deploy custom jar, customDAO.xml and configure the cd_storage file, similar to what we do when extending the storage with Tridion WEB/SITES.

Below is the output captured in the log file in the JSON format after we deployed the custom jar file that contains code to extend and published the item from SDL Tridion DOCS 2013 SP2.

JSON in deployer logs

JSON of Dummy content

In the next blog, we will see what else we can do with this and how much flexible the extension point of storage is, Until then.

Happy Coding and Keep Sharing!!!