Configuring Hard-to-reach settings in Sitecore Containers

I’ve had a problem with some Containers I’m configuring – how do I set machine/environment specific settings in those containers? I can’t just patch them in with Sitecore patches – the files in the image are supposed to be immutable.

I could use Environment Variables (which is what the Sitecore container images do for App Settings and Connection Strings), and the $(env:variablename) syntax gives a way of doing that – but it could mean editing a lot of places.

Well, there’s a better way, and Vitalii Tylyk describes a nice way to do this – Sitecore environment variables config builder.

That’s pretty nifty, but I wonder if it could be adjusted to set cache sizes too…

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Configuring Hard-to-reach settings in Sitecore Containers

Setting your Application Insights Connection String

If you’re adding Application Insights to your solution, you will need to specify a connection string. Usually, this is at the bottom of your applicationinsights.config file:

A nifty alternative is you can specify this connection as an Environment Variable – and App Insights will pick that up and use it…

Continue reading “Setting your Application Insights Connection String”
Setting your Application Insights Connection String

New Sitecore Publishing Targets in Containers

We have a Sitecore system running in containers, and we wanted to add a new publishing target. This is another copy of the WEB database; ours is called “preview”, and it is so that editors can check published content before it goes live.

I followed Sitecore’s documentation about how to do this – and do take note of steps 4 and 5. They’re new, and I missed them to begin with:

  • In the App_Data\items\ folder, make a copy of the Web folder.
  • Rename the copy of the folder and the .dat file inside it. Use the database name (for example, web_preview) instead of web for the folder name and the file name (so the filename is similar to items.web_preview.dat).

It turns out that’s important – without it you’ll get an exception on startup.

However, after doing that, we still had problems with our preview database; the CM server kept throwing an exception.

Continue reading “New Sitecore Publishing Targets in Containers”
New Sitecore Publishing Targets in Containers