I’m participating in Sitecore Hackathon for the first time this year. One of the requirement is to have sitecore 9.1(Initial version) installed on your machine. So I want to share my experience how i quickly installed Sitecore 9.1 using SIF on developer machine in 5 easy steps. This post includes the prerequisites, preparation and installation.

Prerequisites:

OS: Windows 10, Windows Server 2016

DB: Microsoft SQL Server 2017 or 2016 SP2 – Supports the XM database and is the required for the xDB Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Sp2 – Only supports XM databases and does not support the xDB MongoDB Server 3.6.6 – This is required if you are going to use MongoDB for the Collection database or as a Session State Provider

IIS 10

. NET Sitecore XP 9.1.0 requires .NET Framework 4.7.1 Sitecore Identity server requires .NET Core Runtime 2.1.3 You must apply any available updates to the .NET Framework on every Sitecore installation

Search Indexing Solr 7.2.1 – Default search provider Azure Search – supported and recommended for Azure Cloud PaaS deployments only Lucene – Only supports content search and does not support xConnect.

Powershell 5.1 – for Installing SIF

Preparation:

Download installation package(XP Single) from here

Extract the zip file you just downloaded

Again extract this file – XP0 Configuration files 9.1.0 rev. 001564.zip

Copy your license.xml file (If you have enrolled for Hackathon, you should have received the file in email)

Now let’s begin the installation!

Step 1: Solr 7.2.1 Install

Check out Jeremy Davis’s low effort Solr installs. It’s pretty cool! https://jermdavis.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/low-effort-solr-installs/

If you want to take traditional approach(Install as service using NSSM tool), here are the steps

Download Solr from here

Install as service using NSSM tool





It opens the NSSM Service Installer like below. Fill out the fields.

Note: If you already another version of solr running, make sure to give different port name.

Step 2: Install SIF

Run the following scripts in Powershell as administrator.

Register-PSRepository -Name SitecoreGallery -SourceLocation https://sitecore.myget.org/F/sc-powershell/api/v2;

Install-Module SitecoreInstallFramework;

Install-Module SitecoreFundamentals;

Update-Module SitecoreInstallFramework;

Update-Module SitecoreFundamentals;

Import-Module SitecoreFundamentals -Force;

Import-Module SitecoreInstallFramework -Force;

Step 3: Update config files

Update the following files in the folder with the exact information – solr path, solr service name, configsets path, instance name for sitecore, SQL instance name and login credentials.

XP0-SingleDeveloper.ps1

XP0-SingleDeveloper.json

xconnect-solr.json

sitecore-solr.json

Step 4: Install prerequisites

Install-SitecoreConfiguration -Path .\Prerequisites.json

Step 5: Install Sitecore 9.1

Execute the script ./XP0-SingleDeveloper.ps1 (takes good amount of time to execute)

Fingers crossed!

Note: There is no ‘b’ admin password. You can get the password at the end of the script execution. Nice work Sitecore!

Notice that it installed the third site in IIS – Identity Server (New to 9.1)

Also noticed the http://[sitename]/sitecore/login now redictes to identiyserver in the URL.

Have fun exploring Sitecore 9.1!

Any questions, please leave a comment.