While working on finding solution for slow publishing issue of more than 10,000 items in Azure PaaS, I came across this very powerful add-on Sitecore Publishing Services.

Believe it or not but once it is installed, configured and up, it reduced the publishing time drastically. In our case, publishing of those 10,000 items were taking around 1 hour 30 mins(hhhuuuffff…), merely took 12 mins to publish.(Super duper awesome, isn’t it…??? This makes everyone’s life easy)

Thus, I decided to write blog on whole solution. Blog will become very lengthy if I put everything in one. Thus, splitting it in three parts.

Part 1 will cover installation and basic configuration of publishing service. Part 2 will cover installation of publishing module in CMS. The third part will cover advance configuration of publishing service.

So, lets get started…

Download

You can download both Sitecore publishing service and publishing module from Sitecore’s development site here. It is the designed and developed by Sitecore itself.

Note:

Just check the version compatibility with Sitecore version where you wanted to implement this publishing service/module. see image below for more details. (As I have downloaded first the latest and greatest version 4 at the time I am writing this blog for Sitecore 9.0.1 and later figure out it is not compatible.)

Install publishing service on Azure PaaS

With my current client all their Sitecore implementation is in Azure PaaS. It absolutely makes sense to have this Sitecore Publishing service also setting in Azure PaaS. So, follow below steps to get the publishing services up as app service.

• Download the service application as zip file from above link. Select the one which is matching your host architecture type either 32 bit or 64 bit.
• Open Kudu – Advance tool for the web app where you want to host publishing service

• in Kudu editor open command console by navigate to Debug Console menu option and select CMD
• navigate to site root folder using following command

cd site\wwwroot

• Drag and drop service zip file to folder view area above console. This will upload the service package to Azure web app.
• Once upload completed, run following command on console below the folder view

unzip -o *.zip

Assumption

The site’s wwwroot folder has only one zip file which is recently uploaded publishing service zip file.

• Once unzipping of application completed, execute following commands in CMD. This will set connection stings of core, master and web database in publishing service. Going forward, these connection strings will be used for all publishing jobs.

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring core "<core database connection string>"

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring master "<master database connection string>"

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring web "<web database connection string>"

• Once connection strings are configured for these databases the next step is to upgrade the database schema to required one for Sitecore publishing service

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host schema upgrade --force

After executing above command the console displays the result of the command. The below screenshot have result with already updates schema for all the databases as I have previously upgraded the schema.

Once above commands are successfully executed, now it is the time to check the status of the publishing service web application.

In the browser open below URL

http://<<azure app service name>>.azurewebsites.net/api/publishing/maintenance/status

Above web api will return following JSON result if all the configurations are correctly set.

{
    "status": 0
}

This are basic steps to deploy Sitecore Publishing services up and running in azure PaaS. In the Part – 2, will cover installation of Sitecore Publishing Module in Sitecore CM/CA with configuration.