Set up your full-stack SitecoreAI local development environment

Before starting the containers, you must ensure the necessary ports are accessible.

To prepare the environment for running the solution:

The foundation template contains the software components and scripts to:

To set up the template for running locally and start the containers:

If you inspect the content tree using the Content Editor tool while the local instance is running, you'll see that the local instance doesn't have any of the items for your new site. This is because the site was originally created in your remote environment, not in the local one, and the local instance doesn’t automatically include those items. You must therefore transfer the site items to your local and remote repositories so that every developer can access them.

You can synchronize items between environments with Sitecore Serialization. The repository already contains the necessary setup for enabling serialization if you are using an official SitecoreAI foundation template. It also includes the authoring/items/next-starter.module.json file that configures the rendering host item serialization. While developing locally, however, you need additional configuration.

To create a new serialization configuration:

Before performing operations against a remote SitecoreAI instance, you must authenticate within your organization.

To authorize the local project in your organization:

You can connect to one or more remote environments.

To connect to an environment:

The process updates the .sitecore/user.json file with the environment connection configuration if the connection is successful. Assuming you named your environment dev, the .sitecore/user.json file now contains a dev key in the endpoints object:

{
  "endpoints": {
    "xmCloud": {
      ...
    },
    "dev": {
        "ref": "XMCloud",
        "allowWrite": true,
        "host": "<the environment host>",
        "variables": {}
    }
  }
}

You connect the local environment with the Sitecore CLI connect command.

To connect:

The process updates the .sitecore/user.json file with the local environment connection configuration:

{
  "endpoints": {
    "xmCloud": {
      ...
    },
    "dev": {
      ...
    },
    "local": {
        "ref": "xmcloudlocal",
        "allowWrite": true,
        "host": "https://xmcloudcm.localhost",
        "variables": {}
    }
  }
}

With authentication/authorization in place and the necessary environment references added to .sitecore/user.json, your local project is ready to perform serialization operations.

To pull serialized items from the remote environment:

Based on your serialization configuration, the source code now contains the src/items folder with the subfolders content-root, media, and templates.

Now that you have pulled the serialized items that were created in your remote environment from there into your local repository, you can push them into your local instance.

To push the serialized items into your locally running instance:

When the operation is complete, you can see the new items in your locally running instance. You can now commit and push the serialized items to your remote version control repository.

With this setup complete, you can start developing your SitecoreAI solution and your front-end application.

As you work, you can use the Sitecore CLI to perform common development tasks such as: