Get started with XM Cloud + Next.js locally + deploy to Vercel in a matter of minutes

26 October, 2022 / Miguel Minoldo / 1 Comment

Last week the Sitecore Symposium took place in Chicago after 3 years without having the in-person event, it was amazing to be back there and meet with people in person as well as the amazing community folks during the MVP summit.

One of the main announcements was the release of XM Cloud to the public, even though we already knew about the product, and had been able to test and play with it for a while now so decided to write a quick step-by-step guide to help devs getting started, get a better understanding on the development workflow, have a quick overview of the product and so on so forth.

For this demo, I’m not spinning up any local environment (Docker containers), to make it really simple, assuming we want only to tackle it from the front-end side development and we’re not deploying any customization to the XM.

About XM Cloud

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) is a fully managed self-service deployment platform for developers and marketers to efficiently launch engaging omnichannel experiences in the Cloud using Sitecore’s headless CMS. Experience Manager Cloud bundles the latest versions of Experience Manager, the Pages editor, Sitecore Headless Experience Accelerator (S X A), Headless Services, the Sitecore Next.js SDK (and other Heads), and Experience Edge.

With an optimized cloud-based strategy, you can rapidly and cost-effectively scale to meet your customers’ needs, shorten your time-to-market, and be more adaptive as new capabilities and functionality are added to your Martech stack. Explore how the right cloud approach will help you thrive now and into the future.

Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud re-imagines Content Management and introduces a no-compromise Content Management System (CMS) that delivers developer agility through the best attributes of the headless CMS while empowering marketers through a visually rich, WYSIWYG page composition experience. With XM Cloud, our customers can deliver relevant experiences at high speed.

Speed: Visitors are greeted with an experience that loads lightning-fast and engages instantly
Relevance: Customers are recognized and welcomed back to an experience that understands their needs

The importance of your company’s growth comes with the:

Agility: Marketers can easily orchestrate the overall experience across digital campaigns
Flexibility: Developers can rapidly develop and launch new experience types with modern front-end frameworks

Architecture

XM Cloud comes with a Content Management application based on Sitecore XM including known but also new editing Tools. So, you will be able to use Content Editor as well as Experience Editor. In addition to these powerful tools, XM Cloud includes Sitecore Pages to manage your content and Design Pages, and many other tools.

The content delivery is provided by publishing to Edge. That can be Sitecore Edge (configured as default) but also other edge vendors.

Edge delivers content and design information headlessly through the GraphQL endpoint and can be consumed by any head technology such as Next.js, ASP.NET core, Angular, Vue or React.

Developers and System Administrators can manage the XM Cloud instances and deploy the custom CM (Content Management) customizations using the “build and deployment services” as well as the Deploy App that provides the functionalities via UI.

For reference, please check the official documentation here.

Now let’s put our hands to work

Creating the XM Cloud project and Site

The first step of course would be to login into the XM Cloud portal and create a new project.

We can now start from a template or from existing code, I’m selecting “Start from a starter template” as I want to use the XM-Cloud Foundation project.

Step 3 – *Integration with other providers to come*

Time to grab a coffee and by the time you’re back most probably the project would be ready, if that’s not the case, just have a look at the logs so you get a better understanding of what is going on there.

Now the deployment is done and our XM Cloud instance up and running.

If we have a look at Pages, we see the defualt Sitecore homepage, but the tree looks empty. So, let’s create our first site. For that, we go to the “Sites” tab and click on “Add your first website“:

We choose for this example the “Basic Site” template:

We give it a name (mysite) and click on create website, in a few minutes, the site will be ready.

After is done, we can get back to the “Pages” tab and start playing and exploring the new editor.

We can now publish the site to the Edge so we can start querying the GraphQL Endpoint:

Generating the Edge access token

Now that we have the site created and published to the Experience Edge, we have to create our Edge Token so we can set up our local Next.js app and also start querying the edge GraphQL endpoint.

We need now to connect to our XM Cloud instance, for doing that we can use the Sitecore CLI:

dotnet sitecore cloud login

After you get the code, then we can start using the CLI that is now connected to our XM Cloud instance. Now get the projects list and copy the project id corresponding to the recently created project.

dotnet sitecore cloud project list

dotnet sitecore cloud environment list --project-id {project-id}

Now that we know the environment id, we can run the script to generate the edge token. Go to the project root folder and run the following script:

.\New-EdgeToken.ps1 -EnvironmentId {environment-id}

We’ve created now the edge token, the script is already opening the GraphQL playground so you can add the X-GQL-Token to the headers and test a query to the home item:

Setup the local Next.js project

The first step is to navigate to the FE project (/../src/sxastarter) and duplicate the “.env” file, name it “env.local” that is already excluded from git, so that we avoid pushing changes to environment variables by mistake.

In the newly created .env file, we add the API key, GraphQL endpoint, and app name:

SITECORE_API_KEY: The token we generated in the previous step.
GRAPH_QL_ENDPOINT: https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/api/graphql/v1
JSS_APP_NAME: The site name we set in XM Cloud (mysite).

Now we are all set to start the next.js app locally and test it. Still in the same folder (/../src/sxastarter) we ran the commands to install all dependencies and then run the app in connected mode:

npm install
npm run start:connected

Open the browser and go to http://localhost:3000

Deploy to Vercel

Option A – Manual

Now that we have the FE app up and running locally, let’s move one step further and deploy it to Vercel.

We just need to set the environment variables (the same values we already used for the local app) and make sure the root directory is set to “src/sxastarter“.

Click deploy and keep checking logs to make sure everything is going as expected:

Here we go! The site is now running and hosted in Vercel.

Option B – Automatic (Experimental Feature)

First, we need to enable the experimental features, click on the settings icon, in the right upper corner and tick the checkbox:

Then we can go to the project settings and click on “Setup Hosting”

Click on “Create a new Vercel installation” to connect our instance to Vercel:

Select the options and accept them. Now is ready to go and deploy:

Go to Vercel and check its progress, the project is already getting deployed in Vercel!

Done! our site is now live and hosted in Vercel, with only a few clicks, amazing!

This blog post just shows how easy is to get started with XM Cloud, a bit of an overview of what you can expect, and a development workflow from a front-end point of view. Note: For backend development, customizations, etc. I’ll be just spinning up the containers locally and/or working with the Sitecore CLI to pull/push content, more on this later.

Thanks for reading!

References

Check out some very useful video series from Sebastian Winter (@lovesitecore) here.

https://doc.sitecore.com/xmc/en/developers/xm-cloud/getting-started-with-xm-cloud.html

https://developers.sitecore.com/learn/getting-started/xm-cloud-introduction

https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud

https://vercel.com/integrations/sitecore-xm-cloud

Multisite support for Sitecore JSS – Next.js using Vercel’s Edge Middleware – Demo on Sitecore Demo Portal (XM + Edge)!

22 July, 202222 July, 2022 / Miguel Minoldo / 1 Comment

I’ve come across the requirement for supporting a multi-site Sitecore-SXA approach with a single rendering host (Next.js app).

With this approach, we want to lower the costs by deploying to a single Vercel instance and making use of custom domains or sub-domains to resolve the sites.

If you have a look at the Sitecore Nextjs SDK and/or the starter templates, you’ll notice that there is no support for multi-site, so here I’ll go through a possible solution for this scenario where we need also to keep the SSG/ISR functionality from Next.js/Vercel.

The approach

To make it work we basically need to somehow resolve the site we’re trying to reach (from hostname or subdomain) and then pass it through the LayoutService and DictionaryService to resolve those properly.

As we’ve also enabled SSG, we’ll need to do some customization to the getStaticPaths so it generates the sitemap for each site.

Resolving the site by custom domains or subdomains

As I mentioned in the title of the post, I’ll be using Edge Middleware for that, so I’ve based this on the examples provided by Vercel, check the hostname-rewrites example!

For more details on Edge Middleware, please refer to my previous post!

Dynamic routes

Dynamic Routes are pages that allow you to add custom parameters to your URLs. So, we can then add the site name as a param to then pass it through the layout and dictionary services. For more details on dynamic routing, check the official documentation and the example here!

Demo!

We now know all the basics, let’s move forward and make the needed changes to make it work.

For demoing it, I’m just creating a new Sitecore Next.js JSS app by using the JSS initializer and the just recently released Sitecore Demo Portal! – Check this great blog from my friend Neil Killen for a deep overview of it!

Changes to the Next.js app

To accomplish this, as already mentioned, we have to play with dynamic routing, so we start by moving the [[…path]].tsh to a new folder structure under ‘pages’: pages/_sites/[site]/[[…path]].tsh

Then we’ve to create the middleware.ts file in the root of src. The code here is quite simple, we get the site name from the custom domain and then update the pathname with it to do an URL rewrite.

import { NextRequest, NextResponse } from 'next/server'
import { getHostnameDataOrDefault } from './lib/multisite/sites'

export const config = {
  matcher: ['/', '/_sites/:path'],
}

export default async function middleware(req: NextRequest): Promise<NextResponse> {
  const url = req.nextUrl.clone();
  // Get hostname (e.g. vercel.com, test.vercel.app, etc.)
  const hostname = req.headers.get('host');

  // If localhost, assign the host value manually
  // If prod, get the custom domain/subdomain value by removing the root URL
  // (in the case of "test.vercel.app", "vercel.app" is the root URL)
  const currentHost =
    //process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' &&
    hostname?.replace(`.${process.env.ROOT_DOMAIN}`, '');
  const data = await getHostnameDataOrDefault(currentHost?.toString());

  // Prevent security issues – users should not be able to canonically access
  // the pages/sites folder and its respective contents.
  if (url.pathname.startsWith(`/_sites`)) {
    url.pathname = `/404`
  } else {
    // rewrite to the current subdomain
    url.pathname = `/_sites/${data?.subdomain}${data?.siteName}${url.pathname}`;
  }
  
  return NextResponse.rewrite(url);
}

You can see the imported function getHostnameDataOrDefault called there, so next, we add this to /lib/multisite/sites.ts

const hostnames = [
  {
      siteName: 'multisite_poc',
      description: 'multisite_poc Site',
      subdomain: '',
      rootItemId: '{8F2703C1-5B70-58C6-927B-228A67DB7550}', 
      languages: [
        'en'
      ],
      customDomain: 'www.multisite_poc_global.localhost|next12-multisite-global.vercel.app',
      // Default subdomain for Preview deployments and for local development
      defaultForPreview: true,
    },
    {
      siteName: 'multisite_poc_uk',
      description: 'multisite_poc_uk Site',
      subdomain: '',
      rootItemId: '{AD81037E-93BE-4AAC-AB08-0269D96A2B49}', 
      languages: [
        'en', 'en-GB'
      ],
      customDomain: 'www.multisite_poc_uk.localhost|next12-multisite-uk.vercel.app',
    },
]
// Returns the default site (Global)
const DEFAULT_HOST = hostnames.find((h) => h.defaultForPreview)

/**
 * Returns the data of the hostname based on its subdomain or custom domain
 * or the default host if there's no match.
 *
 * This method is used by middleware.ts
 */
export async function getHostnameDataOrDefault(
  subdomainOrCustomDomain?: string
) {
  if (!subdomainOrCustomDomain) return DEFAULT_HOST

  // check if site is a custom domain or a subdomain
  const customDomain = subdomainOrCustomDomain.includes('.')

  // fetch data from mock database using the site value as the key
  return (
    hostnames.find((item) =>
      customDomain
        ? item.customDomain.split('|').includes(subdomainOrCustomDomain)
        : item.subdomain === subdomainOrCustomDomain
    ) ?? DEFAULT_HOST
  )
}

/**
 * Returns the site data by name
 */
export async function getSiteData(site?: string) {
  return hostnames.find((item) => item.siteName === site);
}

/**
 * Returns the paths for `getStaticPaths` based on the subdomain of every
 * available hostname.
 */
export async function getSitesPaths() {
  // get all sites
  const subdomains = hostnames.filter((item) => item.siteName)

  // build paths for each of the sites
  return subdomains.map((item) => {
    return { site: item.siteName, languages: item.languages, rootItemId: item.rootItemId }
  })
}

export default hostnames

I’ve added the custom domains I’d like to use later to resolve the sites based on those. I’ve defined 2 as I want this to work both locally and then when deployed to Vercel.

Changes to the getStaticProps

We keep the code as it is in the [[…path]].tsx, you’d see that the site name is now part of the context.params (add some logging there to confirm this)

Changes to page-props-factory/normal-mode.ts

We need now to get the site name from the context parameters and send it back to the Layout and Dictionary services to set it out. I’ve also updated both dictionary-service-factory.ts and layout-service-factory constructors to accept the site name and set it up.

Please note that the changes are quite simple, just sending the site name as a parameter to the factory constructors to set it up. For the dictionary, we are also setting the root item id.

Changes to getStaticPaths

We have now to modify that in order to build the sitemap for SSG taking all sites into account. The change is also quite simple:

// This function gets called at build and export time to determine
// pages for SSG ("paths", as tokenized array).
export const getStaticPaths: GetStaticPaths = async (context) => {
  ...

  if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'development') {
    // Note: Next.js runs export in production mode
    const sites = (await getSitesPaths()) as unknown as Site[];
    const pages = await sitemapFetcher.fetch(sites, context);
    const paths = pages.map((page) => ({
      params: { site: page.params.site, path: page.params.path },
      locale: page.locale,
    }));

    return {
      paths,
      fallback: process.env.EXPORT_MODE ? false : 'blocking',
    };
  }

  return {
    paths: [],
    fallback: 'blocking',
  };
};

As you can see, we are modifying the fetcher and sending the site’s data as an array to it so it can process all of them. Please note the site param is now mandatory so needs to be returned in the paths data.

Custom StaticPath type

I’ve defined two new types I’ll be using here, StaticPathExt and Site

We need to make some quick changes to the sitemap-fetcher-index.ts now, basically to send back to the plugin the Sites info array and to return the new StaticPathExt type.

import { GetStaticPathsContext } from 'next';
import * as plugins from 'temp/sitemap-fetcher-plugins';
import { StaticPathExt } from 'lib/type/StaticPathExt';
import Site from 'lib/type/Site';

export interface SitemapFetcherPlugin {
  /**
   * A function which will be called during page props generation
   */
  exec(sites?: Site[], context?: GetStaticPathsContext): Promise<StaticPathExt[]>;
}

export class SitecoreSitemapFetcher {
  /**
   * Generates SitecoreSitemap for given mode (Export / Disconnected Export / SSG)
   * @param {GetStaticPathsContext} context
   */
  async fetch(sites: Site[], context?: GetStaticPathsContext): Promise<StaticPathExt[]> {
    const pluginsList = Object.values(plugins) as SitemapFetcherPlugin[];
    const pluginsResults = await Promise.all(
      pluginsList.map((plugin) => plugin.exec(sites, context))
    );
    const results = pluginsResults.reduce((acc, cur) => [...acc, ...cur], []);
    return results;
  }
}

export const sitemapFetcher = new SitecoreSitemapFetcher();

And last, we update the graphql-sitemap-service.ts to fetch all sites and add its info to get returned back to the getStaticPaths

async exec(sites: Site[], _context?: GetStaticPathsContext): Promise<StaticPathExt[]> {
    let paths = new Array<StaticPathExt>();
    for (let i = 0; i < sites?.length; i++) {
      const site = sites[i]?.site || config.jssAppName;
      this._graphqlSitemapService.options.siteName = site;
      this._graphqlSitemapService.options.rootItemId = sites[i].rootItemId;
      if (process.env.EXPORT_MODE) {
        // Disconnected Export mode
        if (process.env.JSS_MODE !== 'disconnected') {
          const p = (await this._graphqlSitemapService.fetchExportSitemap(
            pkg.config.language
          )) as StaticPathExt[];
          paths = paths.concat(
            p.map((page) => ({
              params: { path: page.params.path, site: site },
              locale: page.locale,
            }))
          );
        }
      }
      const p = (await this._graphqlSitemapService.fetchSSGSitemap(
        sites[i].languages || []
      )) as StaticPathExt[];
      paths = paths.concat(
        p.map((page) => ({
          params: { path: page.params.path, site: site },
          locale: page.locale,
        }))
      );
    }
    return paths;
  }

We’re all set up now! Let’s now create some sample sites to test it out. As I already mentioned, I’m not spinning up any Sitecore instance locally or Docker containers but just using the new Demo Portal, so I’ve created a demo project using the empty template (XM + Edge). This is really awesome, I haven’t had to spend time with this part.

Sitecore Demo Portal

I’ve my instance up and running, and it comes with SXA installed by default! Nice ;). So, I’ve just created two sites under the same tenant and added some simple components (from the JSS boilerplate example site).

From the portal, I can also get the Experience Edge endpoint and key:

Note: I’ve had just one thing to do and I’ll give feedback back to Sitecore on this, by default there is no publishing target for Experience Edge, even though it comes by default on the template, so I’ve to check the database name used in XM (it was just experienceedge) and then created a new publishing target.

The first thing is to check the layout service response gonna work as expected, so checked the GraphQL query to both XM and Experience Edge endpoints to make sure the sites were properly resolved.

From XM: https://%5Bsitecore-demo-instance%5D/sitecore/api/graph/edge/ui

From Experience Edge: https://edge-beta.sitecorecloud.io/api/graphql/ide

*GraphQL playground from Experience Edge*

All good, also checked that the site ‘multisite_poc_uk‘ is also working fine.

Now, with everything set, we can test this out locally. The first thing is to set the environment variables so those point to our Experience Edge instance.

JSS_EDITING_SECRET: (from Demo Portal)

SITECORE_API_KEY: (from Demo Portal)

SITECORE_API_HOST=https://edge-beta.sitecorecloud.io

GRAPH_QL_ENDPOINT=https://edge-beta.sitecorecloud.io/api/graphql/v1

FETCH_WITH=GraphQL

Let’s run npm run start:connected in our src/rendering folder!

Note: I’ve added hosts entries to test this out locally:

127.0.0.1 www.multisite_poc_global.localhost
127.0.0.1 www.multisite_poc_uk.localhost

If everything went well, you should be able to see that (check the logging we added in the getStaticProps previously).

Cool! both sites are properly resolved and the small change I’ve made to the content bock text confirms that.

Let’s now run npm run next:build so we test the SSG:

Deploying to Vercel

We’re all set to get this deployed and tested in Vercel, exciting!

I won’t go through the details on how to deploy to Vercel as I’ve already written a post about it, so for details please visit this post!

Couple of things to take into account:

I don’t push my .env file to the GitHub repo, so I’ve set all the environment variables in Vercel itself.
I’ve created 2 new custom domains to test this. Doing that is really straightforward, in Vercel got to the project settings, and domains and create those:

I’ve pushed the changes to my GitHub repo that is configured in Vercel so a deployment just got triggered, check build/deployment logs and the output!