Sitecore 8.2 has been released and it brings a new option for publishing Sitecore Items – Sitecore Publishing Service. This is a feature that my brother Mike Robbins worked on and been so tight lipped about, so it only makes sense for me to dig in to see what it’s all about.

So why use the new Publishing Service? Simply put, it takes less time to publish items, especially large amounts, it is more reliable and provides better User Experience and feedback.

First off, rest easy – the old publishing process from prior versions still exists and is enabled by default. In order to switch your publishing to be handled by the new Sitecore Publishing Service, there are a number of installation steps that need to be completed. I’ll cover how you go about that.

Overview

To gain an insight how the new Sitecore Publishing Service works its best to quickly go over a few of its concepts;

• Publishing Jobs – All publishes are handled via a job and added to a queue to be processed as soon as possible. Therefore the interface is no longer tied up by the publishing dialog. All current and recent publishes can be viewed in the Publishing Dashboard – no longer will you need to keep that dialog open to keep track / get feedback.
• Manifests – The collective name for all the tasks the Publishing Service will complete, items that are valid to be published i.e. no publish / workflow restrictions etc are added to the Manifest. The complete manifest is determined at the start of the publishing process. Each publishing target will have its own Manifest.
• Promotion – The process of moving the Items and Data described in the Manifest from the source to the target databases. Items are processed in batches, configurable in size, compared to the old Sitecore publish which published one Item at a time.
• Manifests Results – The changes that were made as a result of promoting the manifest.
• publishEndResultBatch pipeline – this pipeline is initiated at the end of the publishing job. This is the best place to customise the publishing process, more on that later.

Sitecore Publishing Service is made up of two components.

1. Sitecore Publishing Host – service that runs independently from your Sitecore instance. It is responsible for processing the items that are to be published.
2. Sitecore Publishing Service Module – Sitecore package containing the new UI Elements and configures a connection to the Publishing Host.

The Sitecore Publishing Host needs to be installed first and has a dependency on .NET Core. Additionally, Sitecore recommend running it under IIS which requires installing Windows Server Handling package. Let’s get those prerequisites solved first.

Installing .NET Core

Before installing Sitecore Publishing Service you will need to install .NET Core. If you don’t have .NET Core installed on the machine head to the following link https://www.microsoft.com/net/core. Find the download for your OS then run the installer.

Once installed you’re going to need initiate .NET Core via some commands in Command Line. Make sure you run CMD as Administrator. The commands you need to enter are outlined on the download page above. Once executed you will have installed .NET Core.

Installing Sitecore Publishing Host

First off, the official recommendation from Sitecore is to run the Service under IIS. In order to do that, Windows Service Hosting will need to be installed. Which can be found here – https://www.microsoft.com/net/download#core. Complete the install and you’re good to go.

Finally, let’s work on the Sitecore side of things. Head over to the download page of Sitecore Publishing Service and download the Host resource. This is the Service that will process our items we selected to publish.

There are two options to installing the Host; manual or scripted. Both are valid approaches but I’ll cover scripted here.

• Extract the Sitecore Publishing Service Host zip somewhere you typically store IIS applications. Recommend naming the folder based on the instance we’ll be publishing for
  • e.g. C:\inetpub\wwwroot\sc82rev160729Publishing

• In your website’s connection strings (not the Publishing Service’s) add the attribute MultipleActiveResultSets and set it to true on the databases involved in publishing typically Core, Master and Web
  • e.g. connectionString=”Data Source=(local)\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=sc82rev160729Sitecore_web;Integrated Security=False;User ID=sa;Password=password;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;” 

• Now to create the connection strings for the Service. Open Powershell as Administrator and change the directory to the path of the service and run the following command (but change the connection string value).  It will create a custom file containing a connection string in the global folder
  • e.g.  .\configure.ps1 -connectionstring -key ‘master’ -value ‘user id=sa;password=password;data source=(local)\SQLEXPRESS;database=sc82rev160729Sitecore_master’
  • If you encounter the digitally signed error, right-click on the configure.ps1 file, properties then ‘Unblock’ and re-run
  • You’ll want to repeat or modify the file yourself to add connections for Web and Core database

If you prefer you can use the following xml config instead.

Note that all configs for Publishing Service should begin with the ‘sc.’ prefix so that they are included in the configuration.

• Next set the service up in IIS via the following command
  • e.g. .\install.ps1 -sitename ‘sc82rev160729Publishing’ -appPoolName ‘sc82rev160729Publishing’ -port 80

• Finally, run the schematool.exe to create a new publishing table in the specified databases

If you browse to http://<url of service>/api/publishing/operations/status/ you should see a response {“status”:0}. If not, there is likely an error with your connectionstrings or installs. Once resolved, perform an app recycle to flush the errors.

That’s the host set up. Now onto the Service.

Installing Sitecore Publishing Service

The Sitecore Publishing Service Module comes as a Sitecore package but does require manual changes once installed. Download the Sitecore Publishing Service Module from the Sitecore Site and install the package as you would any other Sitecore package.

Once the installation has been completed browse to your site’s includes folder to create a new Patch config which will override the default setting to tell your site the Url of the Publishing Host we created. See below

If you are configuring Content Delivery servers, ensure the dll Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.dll is present in the bin folder and that the file Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.config is present and enabled.

Give permission to full publish

A decision of Sitecore’s that I am happy about is that security of who has permission to perform a full republish is now controlled in a config file. You can’t grant permission to perform a full site publish to a user/role via the Security Roles in Sitecore anymore.

Meaning we should get less rogue Content Editors completing a full publish each time they change a single item. Awesome.

You can modify which roles can complete a full republish via the allowedFullPublishRoles setting in the Sitecore.Publishing.Service.config. You’ll need to define the role in the format domain\rolename. Recommend you patch this in as well.

Publishing, but faster

Now you’re all set up! Significantly more performant publishing achieved simply. Give it a try and you should see much-improved interface and feedback when publishing;

The publishing is so rapid, its pretty difficult to catch a Publish in the Active Jobs list. Good thing there is a Recent Jobs list, that’ll be handing to see how keeps kicking off a publish.

Customising publishing – publishEndResultBatch 

As you might have guessed there are a number of new configs that the Publishing Service uses. In fact, it does not use any of the existing configurations for the out-of-the-box publishing. These new configs can be found in the App_Config/Includes folder beginning with Sitecore.Publishing.

If you want to add additional steps to publishing you will want to look at the publishEndResultBatch located in the Sitecore.Publishing.Service.config. This event pipeline is initialized after each batch of items have been published. The PublishEndResultBatchArgs will give you everything you need to access all the items from the batch. Meaning you can complete typical tasks of updating site maps etc.

And that’s it!

I may have been a little bias digging into the Publishing Service ahead of other new parts of 8.2 but the Sitecore Product Team and Mike have done a really great job. A few of our bigger clients complain about the performance of publishing 1000s of items in one go.

But it goes beyond the benefits of an improved publish. It’s about adopting and integrating .NET Core into the heart of Sitecore. Meaning everyone will feel the benefit of .NET Core and so soon. This really is an exciting time to be a .NET and Sitecore developer.

If you want further reading on the various configuration of the Publishing Service have a look at the official configuration document.