The AEM SDK and Local Runtime

The AEM SDK

For Cloud Service development you do not install "AEM". You download the AEM SDK from Adobe's Software Distribution portal. It contains two things:

• The Quickstart jar — a local AEM runtime that matches the Cloud Service release.
• The Dispatcher tools — a local Dispatcher you can run in Docker (tomorrow's topic).

The SDK is refreshed regularly to track Cloud Service. Keeping yours current matters more than it used to, because Cloud Service moves underneath you — a bug that only reproduces on an old SDK is usually a bug that has already been fixed upstream.

Starting an instance

The Quickstart is a self-extracting jar. Put it in a folder, name it to encode the port and run mode, and run it:

mkdir -p ~/aem-sdk/author
cp aem-sdk-quickstart-*.jar ~/aem-sdk/author/aem-author-p4502.jar
cd ~/aem-sdk/author
java -jar aem-author-p4502.jar

On first run it unpacks into a crx-quickstart folder beside the jar and asks you to set the admin password. Conventional ports are 4502 for author and 4503 for publish. Run publish the same way in a separate folder with a jar named aem-publish-p4503.jar.

Run modes

A run mode is a label on the running instance that selects which configuration applies. There are two independent axes:

• Tier: author or publish. Fixed at first start and effectively permanent for that instance.
• Environment: dev, stage, prod. On Cloud Service these are set by Adobe per environment.

They combine, and OSGi configuration folders are named accordingly:

ui.config/src/main/content/jcr_root/apps/wknd/osgiconfig/
  config/                  # all instances
  config.author/           # author only
  config.publish/          # publish only
  config.author.dev/       # author on dev only
  config.publish.prod/     # publish on prod only

More specific wins. This is how you point at a test payment endpoint on dev and the real one on prod without a single if in your Java. You will use this heavily on day 30.

You can also set run modes explicitly at startup:

java -jar aem-author-p4502.jar -r author,dev,local

What lands on disk

• crx-quickstart/repository/ — the actual Oak repository (segment store). This is your local content.
• crx-quickstart/logs/error.log — the log you will read most. request.log and access.log sit beside it.
• crx-quickstart/install/ — drop a package or bundle jar here and it installs on startup. Handy for service packs.

SDK vs the classic Quickstart

If you also work on AEM 6.5, that uses a licensed Quickstart jar plus a license.properties file, and it supports things Cloud Service does not (like writing to /apps at runtime, and classic /etc structures). The SDK Quickstart deliberately enforces Cloud Service's rules locally so that what works on your machine also works in the pipeline.