Set up your full-stack XM Cloud 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:

When the local XM Cloud instance is running, if you inspect the content tree using the Content Editor tool, you can see that the local instance of XM Cloud doesn't have any of the items for your new site. When you set up your project, the new site was only created in your remote XM Cloud instance.

You must, therefore, transfer the site items to your local and remote repositories so that every developer has them available.

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 Sitecore XM Cloud foundation template. It also includes the src/renderinghost.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 XM Cloud instance, you must authenticate within your XM Cloud organization.

To authorize the local project in your XM Cloud organization:

You can connect to one or more remote environments.

To connect to an XM Cloud environment:

The process updates the .sitecore/user.json file with the environment connection configuration if the connection is successful. Assuming you named your XM Cloud 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 XM Cloud 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 the serialized items created in your remote XM Cloud environment in your local repository, you can push them into your local XM instance.

To push the serialized items into your locally running XM instance:

When the operation is complete, you can see the new items in your locally running XM 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 XM Cloud solution and your front-end application.

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