Using the AEM Project Archetype using-the-archetype

This document explains how you can use the AEM Project Archetype to create a minimal, best-practices-based Adobe Experience Manager project as a starting point for your own AEM projects.

It focuses on general usage patterns and what the archetype does for you. For detailed build options and technical instructions, please see the documentation in the GitHub repository of the archetype.

Getting Started getting-started

The project archetype makes it easy to get started developing on AEM. You can take your first steps with the archetype in a number of ways.

How to Use the Archetype how-to-use-the-archetype

The first step using the archetype is to create a project, which generates the modules in a local file structure. As part of project generation, a number of properties for your project can be defined such as project name, version, enabling various options, etc.

Building the project with Maven creates the artifacts (packages and OSGi bundles), that can be deployed to AEM. Additional Maven commands and profiles can be used to deploy the project artifacts to an AEM instance.

What You Get Using the Archetype what-you-get

The archetype is made up of modules, all of which are created automatically when using the archetype.

The modules of the archetype represented in Maven are deployed to AEM as content packages representing the application, the content, and the necessary OSGi bundles.

Parent POM parent-pom

The pom.xml at the root of the project (<src-directory>/<project>/pom.xml) is known as the parent POM and drives the structure of the project as well as manages dependencies and certain global properties of the project.

Global Project Properties global-properties

The <properties> section of the parent POM defines several global properties that are important to the deployment of your project on an AEM instance such as user name/password, host name/port, etc.

These properties are set up to deploy to a local AEM instance, as this is the most common build that developers will do. Notice there are properties to deploy to an author instance as well as a publish instance. This is also where the credentials are set to authenticate with the AEM instance. The default admin:admin credentials are used.

These properties are set up so that they can be overridden when deploying to higher level environments. In this way the POM files do not have to change, but variables like aem.host and sling.password can be overridden via command line arguments:

mvn -PautoInstallPackage clean install -Daem.host=production.hostname -Dsling.password=productionpasswd

Module Structure module-structure

The <modules> section of the parent POM defines the modules that the project will build. By default the project builds the standard modules previously defined. More modules can always be added as a project evolves.

Dependencies dependencies

The <dependencyManagement> section of the parent POM defines all of the dependencies and versions of APIs that are used in the project. Versions should be managed in the parent POM. Sub-modules should not include any version information.

Uber-Jar uber-jar

One of the key dependencies is the AEM Java API Jar. This will include all of the AEM APIs with just a single dependency entry for the version of AEM.

Core Components core-components

The archetype of course leverages the Core Components. Therefore, in order to leverage the Core Components in all deployments, it is a best practice to include them as part of the Maven project.

The core.wcm.components.examples are a set of sample pages that illustrate examples of the Core Components. As a best practice, when deploying a project for production use you should remove this dependency and subpackage inclusion.

Testing testing

There are three levels of testing contained in the project and because they are different types of tests, they are executed in different ways or in different places.