Sitecore Publishing Service on CM – CD Environments

Publishing Service is one of the great features Sitecore has. I used to have issues publishing my site as there are lots of items in there and it was a slow procedure since that you need to wait until the publishing ends so that you would be able to continue working on Sitecore. 

Now, with this service, you are able to continue working on Sitecore while publishing your site, plus this process is much faster than before.

The reason behind me writing this blog is to focus on the publishing service installation on a content management server as I faced a couple of issues before installing it on sitecore, so I would like to share those issues with you.

 As we know, one of the basic steps that needs to be done before installing the service is to install the .NET Core. When I followed the steps to install the service host, I used to get an error when trying to test if the service works before installing it on Sitecore (you should get the following result {"status":0} usually to make sure that the service works fine but I never got it).

The error was not informative to be able to figure out the issue. After some investigation and the help of Sitecore Support, I found out that installing .NET Core is not enough on the CM server. You need to make sure that the ASPNetCoreModule is installed (This is required to host .NET Core projects in IIS). You can check if it is installed by opening IIS and looking for it in the modules section.

If you didn’t find it, you need to install ASP.NET Core Server Hosting Bundle (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=798480), and this would solve the issue.

When installing the service host and adding the connection strings file that connects the service with the Sitecore databases, you need to add another node for the pub database. Moreover, you need to add a target definition node under the “targets” node for the pub database:

Note: The target node should have the same name as the publishing target item name in Sitecore. Ex.: “DEV-CM”.

Hope this blog is useful :)