Commerce Server Blog

Commerce server staging (in short CSS), helps us to transfer and update business data and web site content from one environment to another environment.  In the nutshell, CSS provides following functionality.

• Remotely administer servers and projects.
• Replicate web site content or business data over LAN and through firewalls (TCP port 507).
• You can deploy content or data manually or on pre-determined schedule.
• Replicate IIS metadata
• Configure scripts and/or batch files to run before or after content or data is replicated.

Few things to make note of:

• Business data includes catalog schema and data, Marketing data, site terms, order configuration.
• You can’t stage/ replicate profile schema, profile data, inventory schema, order data, direct mailer job, lists and confirguration.
• All business data types supported by CSS can refresh site cache.
• Web Content, includes HTML, images, ASP.NET pages, commerce server pipelines and other files, IIS metadata.
• IIS meta data includes information about the files in the website and its configuration.
• Make sure TCP port 507 is open in order staging site work.
• Roll back feature is applicable to web content deployment only.

The below diagram explains how staging works. In CSS, we have three types of servers.

• Source staging server – this is the server from where the content & data is deployed.
• End point server – this is the server to which the content & data is deployed.
• Way point server – this server is used to relay the content & data from source staging server to end point server.

In the below diagram demonstrates how the data is moved from one environment to another environment. The CSS service can be installed on dedicated box or on all environment servers.

In order to understand CSS, you have to learn two concepts – one is project and another one route. A CSS project defines the properties of a CSS deployment and it takes few key properties like, name, type (content deployment or business data deployment) and project source (path where the data is staged). Some of the points we have to remember while creating a project.

• A project needs to be created in each CSS server involved in staging. (The above diagram, we are using single CSS server for all deployments).
• Project name should be same for all CSS servers (this will not accept special characters including space) and the properties may differ from one project to other.
• Project properties tells the purpose of staging.
• Project type must be same for the same projects across CSS servers. For example, if the project at source staging server is “web deployment” then the end point server project type should be the same.

A route in CSS signifies a path by which the data is moved from source to destination. A route will hold few properties such as route name, local directory to store the data and the destination server. As CSS project, route is also required to have few mandatory settings in order to work and they are

• A route needs to be created in each CSS server involved in staging.
• Route name should be same for all CSS servers .

Note: Defining a route is not compulsory for a given deployment. In majority of the deployments, I have seen, we have created CSS projects without routes. This is applicable if the source server can’t access the destination server directly.

In coming posts, I will try to explain how commerce server staging works, command line tools and how can we write scripts to make the deployment easier.

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