Adobe AEM 6.2 Starting From GROUND ZERO

Currently I am working as a system administrator in a leading MNC and I am just a beginner in this field so just started exploring the vast sea of shell scripting,CI/CD,Jenkins etc. And then suddenly my project gets a quick turn over and I get to manage Adobe’s big new ‘thing’ called the “ADOBE EXPERIENCE MANAGER”. Now I was totally zero on what to do,how to manage and all but the good thing was that the same was for my team as well. So basically I had company. We had a few sessions on what AEM was and stuff but then we jumped into the graveyard of AEM as project timelines was tight.

We started with the installation of AEM and as Adobe people say - everything is well documented and you can find it in the blogs and documentation notes of Adobe. In this story I am going to be showcase some tips for using AEM and some issues that I faced in that course and how they were solved. This document is only meant for the folks who are have just started working with Adobe AEM and are facing random issues popping up due to ignorance

1. Installation Delay — Getting not found
While Installing AEM with

java -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Xmx1024M -jar cq5-author-p4502.jar

the command makes sure to wait for a considerable amount of time so as to make all the bundles to load and get activated properly and then after making sure that the bundles are all loaded properly ,stop the command with Ctrl+c and the use the startup script to start the service. In that also make sure to edit the startup script as per your need before starting.

2. Code Changes not getting Reflected
Whenever a code is deployed into the AEM instance make sure that the bundles are active or else the changes that are there in code won’t be visible. This scenario of a bundle not being active is more frequent when remote code is used to deploy the code.

3. crx/de Structure Not Visible
If AEM installed in no sample content mode in crx/de page the folder structure will not be visible. This is done as a part of the security checklist by Adobe. The way it can be activated is by activating these bundles :

Apache Sling DavEx Access to repositories
Apache Sling Simple WebDAV Access to repositories

Another method is by running the following command

curl -u admin:admin -F “jcr:primaryType=sling:OsgiConfig” -F “alias=/crx/server” -F “dav.create-absolute-uri=true” -F “dav.create-absolute-uri@TypeHint=Boolean” http://localhost:7503/apps/system/config/org.apache.sling.jcr.davex.impl.servlets.SlingDavExServlet

This will activate this bundle org.apache.sling.jcr.davex.impl.servlets.SlingDavExServlet thereby providing access to all to the folder structure

4. Activation Tree Not Present
For replication, if the activation tree is not present, copy a working activation tree from another aem instance to this aem instance.

5. Not enough Space
While creating a new package if you see an error regarding space then, first of all, check the server space and then the tmp directory path space. The package manager uses /tmp folder to a temporary store package. So if package size is more than space left in /tmp folder you might get this issue. Make sure that you have enough space left in /tmp folder.

You can change your startup parameters and move the location of your tmp location. Set this jvm parameter in your CQ start script in the CQ_JVM_OPTS variable (change /path/to/new/temp to your desired temp directory location): Djava.io.tmpdir=/path/to/new/temp

Note: This should be done while installing AEM.

6. Authors permission — Tags not visible

• Make sure to give permission to read write and modify all the contents which include tags, content, and dam so as they will be able to view all the things required for authoring

7. Anonymous permissions
Unable to see the changes in the dispatcher or publisher if not admin.

• give read permission to folders like app, home, content, etc and folders that are necessary for viewing the page in publish.

8. Create a replication.log
Sometimes it can be very helpful to set all replication logging to be added in a separate log file at DEBUG level. To do this:

- Go to http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr and login as admin.
- Find the Apache Sling Logging Logger factory and create an instance by clicking the + button on the right of the factory configuration. This will create a new logging logger.
- Set the configuration like this:
- Log Level: DEBUG
- Log File Path: (CQ5.4 and 5.3) ../logs/replication.log (CQ5.5) logs/replication.log
- Categories: com.day.cq.replication
- If you suspect the problem to be related to sling eventing/jobs in any way then you can also add this java package under categories: org.apache.sling.event

9. Activating Compression
To activate compression, you will need to log in to your Felix console and enable the minify option.

Go to http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr
Scroll down and click on “Day CQ HTML Library Manager”
Click on the Minify checkbox
(Optional) Enable Gzip

Folks that’s all from me. I hope the issues I faced will not be faced by others. Please have a proper understanding of AEM and its working as this will be important from the standpoint of an administrator.

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