Sitecore 9.3 was released on November 28th and it’s cool as ever. Sitecore SXA 9.3 has also been released along with Sitecore Experience Platform 9.3 and several other suite of Sitecore Products. More about Sitecore 9.3 key upgrades and other Sitecore Products can be found in the official Sitecore Page. I am planning on sharing my experience with these new upgrades and how one can leverage them, in my upcoming posts.
Installation.
Phew….Sitecore 9.3 XP Single package comes up with Sitecore Install Assistant – an GUI Based Sitecore setup. I haven’t tried installing Sitecore 9.2. Having said that, after 9.1 installation experience ,9.3 installation is the smoothest and time saving as well.
While installing 9.1 we had to run a lot of PowerShell scripts, setup Solr on our own and setup solr as service and certificates etc.
Guess Sitecore understood the pain area and worked on it.
IN this post, I will share my experience on installing 9.3 using the Sitecore Install Assistant.
First, download the Graphical Setup package for XP Single.
Extract the package and you will find the setup file, RUN the setup file to launch the Sitecore Install Assistant
On Sitecore 9.1, we would have downloaded the Sitecore Install Framework using PowerShell. The SIA takes care of the all the prerequisites.
Once, all the prerequisites are downloaded, SIA provides us options to Install 8.1.1 optionally or we can also install Solr on our own and provide the necessary config. Make sure the port you provide here is free and it is not used by any other program.
Once this Step is completed, Solr will be installed in your local and it will created as a windows service. You can verify it by accessing and by checking the windows service.
These are self explanatory.
Fill in the SQL Database details.
Next fill in the Solr details. If you have skipped installing you can provide your solr config details here.
Sitecore provides at additional option to install Sitecore SXA 9.3
The Next screen allows you to check the configs.
Finally, once everything is done, Sitecore validates the provided configs. Once, done you can click Install.
Installation will be in two parts – Sitecore Web Deploy and SXA Deploy
Click Next and then Launch the Sitecore Site.
As much as it may be, but installing Sitecore 9.1 gives you more insight. It would give you a better understanding of all those behind the screen tasks being done here. 92 tasks in the Installation part 1, setting up Identity Server, XConnect running the marketing automation and other services you can see these logs while installing via PowerShell – Sitecore 9.1.
Even for 9.3 once installation is complete I would recommend one to go through the Sitecore Installation logs. It gives you a better insight of what’s happening in the back.
Remember:
- Sometimes IIS might get stopped after Solr installation we might need to restart it manually.
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