AEM Author and Publish

AEM Author
The main purpose of the author is to give editorial staff a single place they can edit the editorial parts of their site, and control what is visible to the end-user.

For most users that login to the author this is all, they will be able to do, using the sites page the user can browse to the page they want to edit, and depending on the rights their user as they can then make changes and potentially publish the changes to the publishers.

The author is, in fact, a full AEM instance with all of the same functionality that is available to the publishers, but because it is the hub between the multiple publishers it has a very important task of content replication to all of the publisher's servers.

Most of the administration of an AEM stack is done on the author. This includes not only site creation/modification but also user/group administration, content restrictions, and site mappings. All of these tasks are undertaken on the author and published to each of the publishers for use on the published site.

Because it is a full system any page can be viewed on the author as if it was running on the end system, which allows the editorial staff the ability to see what the site will look like when it is live.

The setup of an author is as simple as telling it what port and run mode to start with. This is done from the AEM jar file. Renaming the jar as aem-author-4502.jar and running it with java jar-aem-author-4502.jar will create an author in the crx-quickstart folder.

You will need a valid AEM license file in the same folder for AEM to work.

The name of the jar file is what determines the default runmode (author/publish) and the port to start the server on. The default structure for the jar name is <name>-<default run mode>-<port>.jar. While this is the standard to be able to create a new server with the command java -jar aem-author-4502.jar you can also pass the parameters to determine this information as discussed on the custom standalone install page

Once created the default run mode can't be changed as it is backed into the extracted system folders.

AEM Publish
The main purpose of the publisher is to serve content to the end-user. The publisher is generally not visible to any user other than the operations staff for maintenance.

Content is delivered to the publisher from the author as part of its replication services, this includes replication from the publisher back to the author via the reverse replication service which pulls content from the publishers outbox.

Because the server is generally hidden from the internet only a system administrator can make changes to the configuration of the publisher. Because of this, any changes that have to be made manually should be kept to a minimum.

Setting up a publisher is as simple as telling it what port and run mode to start with. This is done from the AEM jar file. Renaming the AEM jar as aem-publish-4503.jar and running it with the command java jar-aem-publish-4503.jar will create a new publisher in the crx-quickstart folder.

You will need a valid AEM license file in the same folder for AEM to work.

The name of the jar file is what determines the default runmode (author/publish) and the port to start the server on. The default structure for the jar name is <name>-<default run mode>-<port>.jar. While this is the standard to be able to create a new server with the command java -jar aem-author-4502.jar you can also pass the parameters to determine this information as discussed on the custom standalone install page

Once created the default run mode can't be changed as it is backed into the extracted system folders.