Enabling the Front-End Pipeline enable-front-end-pipeline
Learn how you can enable the front-end pipeline for existing sites to use site themes to customize your site more quickly.
Overview overview
The front-end pipeline is a mechanism that can quickly deploy just the front-end code of your websites based on site themes and site templates.
This pipeline handles only front-end code, making the deployment process faster than full-stack deployments. It allows front-end developers to customize your site easily without needing knowledge of AEM.
Sites based on site templates can use the front-end pipeline by default. This document describes how you can adapt your existing sites to take advantage of the front-end pipeline.
AEM can configure your site to load themes deployed with the Front End Pipeline, even if your site was not created using site templates and themes, by layering them on top of existing client libraries.
Technical Details technical-details
When you activate the front-end pipeline for a site, AEM makes the following changes to your site structure.
- All pages of the site include one additional CSS and JS file, which can be modified by deploying updates through a dedicated Cloud Manager front-end pipeline.
- The added CSS and JS files are empty initially. However, you can download a “theme sources” folder to set up the folder structure needed to deploy CSS and JS code updates through the pipeline.
- Only a developer can undo the change, by deleting the
SiteConfigandHtmlPageItemsConfignodes that this operation creates below/conf/<site-name>/sling:configs.
Requirements requirements
AEM can automatically adapt your existing site to use the front-end pipeline. To be able to do this workflow, your site must use v2 or newer of the Page Component of the Core Components.
Enabling Front-End Pipeline enabling
See Use of the Cloud Manager IP Allow List with the front-end pipeline.
Enabling your site is done from the Sites console using the Site rail.
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Log into AEM and navigate to your site via Global Navigation > Sites.
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Select your site in the console. Select the root of the site and not any child pages.
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With your site selected, open the rail selector at the left and choose Site.
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In the Site rail, click the button Enable Front End Pipeline.
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AEM prompts you to confirm with an overview of the changes that are made. Confirm and your site is adapted.
Now, your site is ready to use the front-end pipeline. To learn more about the front-end pipeline and managing your site theme see:
- Using the Site Rail to Manage Your Site Theme
- Quick Site Creation Journey - This documentation journey gives you and beginning-to-end overview of the process of quickly deploying a site using the front-end pipeline and the Quick Site Creation tool.
- CI/CD Pipelines - This document describes the front-end pipeline in the context of the full-stack and web tier pipelines.
Front-End Pipeline and Custom Domains custom-domains
The Front-End Pipeline can be used with Cloud Manager’s custom domains feature, but please be aware of the following requirements when using the two features together.
Static Front-End Files static-files
Static front-end assets deployed via the Front-End Pipeline will, by default, be served from Adobe’s predefined static domain.
If you require a custom domain for front-end assets, you can install a custom domain on the publish tier and configure the Dispatcher to route specific paths (such as /static/) to Adobe’s static hosting location. This method requires updating your Dispatcher rules to properly forward and cache requests for static assets.
Once you configure your custom domain and dispatcher, you can configure AEM to serve your front-end assets from the static domain.
Configuration configuration
As described in the Technical Details section, activating the Front-End Pipeline feature for a site creates a SiteConfig and HtmlPageItemsConfig nodes below /conf/<site-name>/sling:configs.
If you wish to use Cloud Manager’s custom domains feature for your site along with the Front End Pipeline for status assets, additional properties must be added to these nodes.
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Set the
customFrontendPrefixproperty inSiteConfigfor the site.- Navigate to
/conf/<site-name>/sling:configs/com.adobe.aem.wcm.site.manager.config.SiteConfig. - Add or update the property
customFrontendPrefix = "https://your-custom-domain.com/static/".
- Navigate to
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This updates the
prefixPathvalue of theHtmlPageItemsConfigwith the custom domain.-
Navigate to
/conf/<site-name>/sling:configs/com.adobe.cq.wcm.core.components.config.HtmlPageItemsConfig. -
Verify that the
prefixPathreflects your custom domain such asprefixPath = "https://your-custom-domain.com/static/<hash>/...".
- This value can also be manually overridden as required.
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Verify your setup.
- After deployment, check that pages are correctly referencing theme artifacts from the custom domain.
- Open your browser’s developer tools and inspect the
theme.cssandtheme.jsfile paths to confirm they are loaded from the correct domain.
Pages for the site then reference theme artifacts from that updated URL. The dispatcher then routes requests for those resources to the static domain.
Best Practices for Front-End Developers best-practices
If you need to develop and test front-end assets locally before deploying via the Front-End Pipeline, consider the following approaches:
- Use the Site Theme Builder’s Proxy Mode to override theme artifacts locally for testing.
- Manually serve your theme files from a local development server and update the
prefixPathinHtmlPageItemsConfigto match the local server address. - Ensure browser caching is disabled during testing to see live updates.
For more details on local front-end development, refer to the Site Theme Builder documentation.