I have already explored Unicorn and Sitecore Management Services for Sitecore Content Serialization purpose and written couple of articles about them. This is in continuation to that series.
(a small recap, to set the article context)
Prev. developers used TDS/Unicorn for content synchronization. TDS comes with license cost whereas Unicorn is open source. Although these two tools does the same functionality – Content Sync, the way in which they do that greatly differs. As TDS is a licensed tool, it comes with better UI and few additional features compared to Unicorn.
But these are all in the past. With Sitecore 10, sitecore introduced a new alternative to TDS/Unicorn which is Sitecore Content Serialization – a system for serializing, sharing, and deploying content items, as well as keeping them in version control.
SCS comes with two interface – Sitecore CLI(a PowerShell based approach) and Sitecore for Visual Studio(a TDS module).
We have seen about Sitecore CLI in prev. post. In this article, we’ll explore more about Sitecore for Visual Studio.
Sitecore for Visual Studio comes up with a per license cost of 399$. But thanks to their trail program, I was able to get a trial version for 30 days which I used for exploring SVS. The link for free TDS Trial. You can only use your official mail id – your organization’s mail ID to get the license key. The license key will be sent to your mail id.
You can download the SVS plugin from this link. The latest version, Sitecore for Visual Studio 4.1.0.0 requires, Visual Studio Community 2019 17 and above. Unfortunately, my local version is not updated to that version yet so I am using SVS 1.0.0.9 for this demo.
Once downloaded, unzip->install the SVS VS Plugin.
After installation, when you open your VS Solution, you’ll be presented with the License Agreement, accept them. Post that you’ll be redirected to the License Manager Dialog. Enter you license details and proceed.
After entering the license details, you can open the Sitecore Module Explorer from View->Other Windows->Sitecore Module Explorer.
I have two module.json file in my solution, SVS automatically detects the module.json files and shows them here. (You can add module,included and rules right clicking Modules->New Module. Enter the module details like namespace etc. Right Click on the module to add includes.)
You can pull the changes from Sitecore to Disk by right clicking on the module.
We can check-in the changes and in the target environment we can do the ser push which will move the synced yml changes to sitecore content tree.
Watch
With watch enabled, whenever we make a change to an item in the content tree, sitecore automatically serializes that item to disk.
For eg. The existing value of a field in my home item is,
After changing,
Without doing any pull as watch is enabled,
To conclude, Sitecore CLI and Sitecore for Visual Studio are not entirely two different tools. They are just two different ways of doing the same process. Both same components in the background. Advantage is SVS gives a friendly UI. We can add or remove modules, set module scope/add rules easily. But this comes with a 399$ license cost.(Including TDS).
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