AEM Project Archetype

Maven template that creates a minimal, best-practices-based Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) project as a starting point for your website.

Welcome

• Contributions are welcome, read our contributing guide for more information.

Documentation

• Archetype Documentation: The product documentation provides an overview of the archetype and its general features.
• GitHub Documentation: The README.md documentation in this repo provides detailed technical usage detail of the archetype and all of its modules.
• Tutorials: The following tutorials are based off this archetype:
  • WKND Site: Learn how to start a fresh new website.
  • WKND SPA Learn how to build a React or Angular webapp that is fully authorable in AEM.

Features

• Best Practice: Bootstrap your site with all of Adobe's latest recommended practices.
• Low-Code: Edit your templates, create content, deploy your CSS, and your site is ready for go-live.
• Cloud-Ready: If desired, use AEM as a Cloud Service to go-live in few days and ease scalability and maintenance.
• Dispatcher: A project is complete only with a Dispatcher configuration that ensures speed and security.
• Multi-Site: If needed, the archetype generates the content structure for a multi-language and multi-region setup.
• Core Components: Authors can create nearly any layout with our versatile set of standardized components.
• Editable Templates: Assemble virtually any template without code, and define what the authors are allowed to edit.
• Responsive Layout: On templates or individual pages, define how the elements reflow for the defined breakpoints.
• Header and Footer: Assemble and localize them without code, using the localization features of the components.
• Style System: Avoid building custom components by allowing authors to apply different styles to them.
• Front-End Build: Front-end devs can mock AEM pages and build client libraries with Webpack, TypeScript, and SASS.
• Decoupled Front-End: When choosing the frontend module to be decoupled, the project is preconfigured to use the AEMaaCS Frontend Pipeline. See the AEM React SPA template for more details how to get started with a decoupled frontend module using React.
• WebApp-Ready: For sites using React or Angular, use the SPA SDK to retain in-context authoring of the app.
• Commerce Enabled: For projects that want to use Commerce Integration Framework (CIF) to integrate with commerce solutions like Magento.
• Forms Enabled: For projects that want to use (Forms).
• Testing: ready-to-use Functional and UI testing modules, start adding your own tests
• Example Code: Checkout the HelloWorld component, and the sample models, servelets, filters, and schedulers.
• Open Sourced: If something is not as it should, contribute your improvements!

Usage

To generate a project, adjust the following command line to your needs:

• Set aemVersion=cloud for AEM as a Cloud Service;
  Set aemVersion=6.5.8 for Adobe Managed Services, or on-premise. The Core Components dependency is only added for non cloud aem versions as the Core Components are provided OOTB for AEM as a Cloud Service.
• Adjust appTitle="My Site" to define the website title and components groups.
• Adjust appId="mysite" to define the Maven artifactId, the component, config and content folder names, as well as client library names.
• Adjust groupId="com.mysite" to define the Maven groupId and the Java Source Package.
• Lookup the list of available properties to see if there's more you want to adjust.

mvn -B org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin:3.2.1:generate \
 -D archetypeGroupId=com.adobe.aem \
 -D archetypeArtifactId=aem-project-archetype \
 -D archetypeVersion=51\
 -D appTitle="My Site" \
 -D appId="mysite" \
 -D groupId="com.mysite"

Note: Make sure you use at least 3.1.0+ of maven-archetype-plugin (#400)

Note: To run above command with older versions, you have to use the old archetypeGroupId: -D archetypeGroupId=com.adobe.granite.archetype

Available Properties

Name	Default	Description
appTitle		Application title, will be used for website title and components groups (e.g. "My Site").
appId		Technical name, will be used for component, config and content folder names, as well as client library names (e.g. "mysite").
artifactId	${appId}	Base Maven artifact ID (e.g. "mysite").
groupId		Base Maven group ID (e.g. "com.mysite"). This value must be a valid Java package name.
package	${groupId}	Java Source Package (e.g. "com.mysite").
version	1.0-SNAPSHOT	Project version (e.g. 1.0-SNAPSHOT).
aemVersion	cloud	Target AEM version (can be cloud for AEM as a Cloud Service; or 6.5.8 for Adobe Managed Services or on-premise).
sdkVersion	latest	When aemVersion=cloud an SDK version can be specified (e.g. 2020.02.2265.20200217T222518Z-200130).
includeDispatcherConfig	y	Includes a dispatcher configuration either for cloud or for AMS/on-premise, depending of the value of aemVersion (can be y or n).
frontendModule	general	Includes a Webpack frontend build module that generates the client libraries (can be general or none for regular sites; can be angular, react or decoupled for a Single Page App that implements the SPA Editor. In the later case the project will be preconfigured to use the AEM as a Cloud Service Frontend Pipeline).
language	en	Language code (ISO 639-1) to create the content structure from (e.g. en, deu).
country	us	Country code (ISO 3166-1) to create the content structure from (e.g. US).
singleCountry	y	Includes a language-master content structure (can be y, or n).
includeExamples	n	Includes a Component Library example site (can be y, or n).
includeErrorHandler	n	Includes a custom 404 response page that will be global to the entire instance (can be y or n).
includeCif	n	Includes CIF Core Components dependencies and generates corresponding artifacts.
commerceEndpoint		Required for CIF only. Optional endpoint of the commerce system GraphQL service to be used (e.g. https://hostname.com/grapql).
includeFormscommunications	n	Includes Forms Core Components dependencies and generates corresponding artifacts.
includeFormsenrollment	n	Includes Forms Core Components dependencies and generates corresponding artifacts.
sdkFormsVersion	latest	When aemVersion=cloud and one of includeFormsenrollment=y or includeFormscommunications=y an Forms SDK version can be specified (e.g. 2020.12.17.02).
datalayer	y	Activate integration with Adobe Client Data Layer.
amp	n	Enable AMP support for generated project templates.
enableDynamicMedia	n	Enabled foundation DynamicMedia components in project policy settings and activates Dynamic Media features in Core Image component's policy.
enableSSR	n	Option to enable SSR for the front-end project
precompiledScripts	n	Option to precompile the server-side scripts from ui.apps and attach them to the build as a secondary bundle artifact in the ui.apps project. aemVersion should be set to cloud.
includeFormsheadless	n	Includes Forms Core Components dependencies, ui.frontend.react.forms.af and headless artifacts.

System Requirements

Archetype	AEM as a Cloud Service	AEM 6.5	Java SE	Maven
51	Continual	6.5.17.0+	8, 11	3.3.9+

Setup your local development environment for AEM as a Cloud Service SDK or for older versions of AEM.

Known Issues

• When running on Windows and generating the dispatcher configuration, you should be running in an elevated command prompt or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (see #329).

• When executing the archetype in interactive mode (without the -B parameter), the properties with default values cannot be changed, unless the final confirmation gets dismissed, which then repeats the questions by including the properties with default values in the questions (see ARCHETYPE-308 for details).

• You can't use this archetype in Eclipse when starting a new project with File -> New -> Maven Project since the post generation script archetype-post-generate.groovy will not be executed due to an Eclipse issue. Workaround is to use the above command line and then in Eclipse use File -> Import -> Existing Maven Project.

Security Vulnerabilities

The aem-project-archetype is not considered part of the core AEM product, in that if Adobe updates the archetype to address security vulnerabilities it will not automatically propagate to all the projects created using it. The archetype is rather a template you can use to start a project, essentially copying and pasting code and running some post-processing scripts.

Users of the archetype are responsible for updating the build-time dependencies of their projects created with the archetype to address any security vulnerabilities, including any maven dependencies, maven plugin dependencies, and npm package dependencies. Furthermore, it is important to understand that dependencies (and in particular, maven dependencies) usually describe the minimal API version the code supports at runtime. The dependency versions effectively used at runtime may be newer and not vulnerable. Please always verify any reported vulnerable (transitive) dependencies against the list of bundles deployed at runtime in AEM as a Cloud Services or the currently used Service Pack on AMS or on-prem.

Please continue to report security vulnerabilities to Adobe following the official security policies and procedures docurmented here. Please understand that Adobe uses some third-party dependencies, which it only has partial control over. For such dependencies it is important to report the vulnerabilities directly to the owner or to the contributors of these dependencies. Adobe will update the archetype once the transitive dependencies have been updated, but that may take more time.

In order to update transitive dependencies, please exclude the vulnerable transitive dependency and declare a more recent version within the project. For example:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.wcm</groupId>
  <artifactId>io.wcm.testing.aem-mock.junit5</artifactId>
  <scope>test</scope>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
      <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
  <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
  <version>2.7</version>
</dependency>

Updating Existing Projects to the Lastest Archetype Release

The AEM Project Archetype is a tool to create a minimal, best-practices-based AEM project as a starting point for your website. As a starting point, it is not usually required to update an existing project to the latest release of the archteype. However, keeping project dependencies up-to-date remains a responsiblity of each individual project.

Efforts to update to the latest release of the archetype can be significant depending on the age and complexity of the project. If you have determined that the benfits of an update outweigh the effort, Adobe recommends the following steps.

1. Compare the release of the archetype initially used for your project with the current release on in GitHub. For example https://github.com/adobe/aem-project-archetype/compare/aem-project-archetype-46...aem-project-archetype-50 2, Update the changed dependencies.
2. Update the plugin dependencies
3. Progressively apply the remaining changes as needed.

Adobe strongly recommends sufficient test coverage (including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests) to ensure that an update does not introduce unexpected behavior.

Updating Immutable Dispatcher Files

Your local immutable files can be updated by running the bin/update_maven.sh src/dispatcher script on your Dispatcher folder, where src/dispatcher is your Dispatcher configuration directory. This script also updates any pom.xml file in the parent directory so that the maven immutability checks also get updated.

For further details, please see the document Validating and Debugging using Dispatcher Tools in the AEM as a Cloud Service documentation.