Seeing is believing: Explore the AEM installation directory

Now, we have installed AEM and started it. Before we log in to AEM, let us see what exactly is created in your system. Move to the installation directory – that’s the directory to where you copied the QuickStart jar file and the license file.

You will notice that it created a folder, crx-quickstart. Whenever you start AEM for the first time, it creates the QuickStart folder. It saves all the required data inside it. After you make changes, it saves the changes there. Since you have started AEM once, it retains the folder for subsequent restarts. You will notice that whenever you start AEM for the first time, it takes a little longer time to start, because it needs to create the QuickStart folder.

Move into the QuickStart folder. Let us not get into a lot of technical details for the time being.



Following are the two folders that I would like you to familiarize with:
Logs: The logs files. There is an error.log file inside it. We will use error.log file frequently to see what went wrong with AEM if it misbehaves.
repository: Navigate inside it. Go inside segmentstore. You will see a lot of tar files.


AEM stores that data in this format. This is the default configuration. You can also save the data in MongoDB. We will see that later. There are more folders and files. We will explore them in detail later.