Adobe CQ5 Setup in production

Question

I am not a CQ guy. I have to use CQ5 for one of my project. I have a CAT and a production environment. I have following doubts-

1. I want to use author instance of my CAT only. Once I publish the content in CAT it should publish in Production also. Is it possible ?

2. Once I update the build of AdobeCQ in my production say new build, code changes etc- will my content be lost ?

3. I read somewhere about Content package in cq5. Can I separate content changes and code changes in one CQ5 environment ?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

To answer question 1...

This is not a recommended setup, but a common misconception for someone unfamiliar with AEM/CQ5. The "author" and "publish" instances should be part of the same environment. For example you should have a production author, probably behind your firewall, and production publish to serve pages to the public.

Your CAT environment should have the same thing. You want your testing environment to match as closely as possible to your production environment, including web server and dispatcher setup, to ensure quality.

Consider this. You can use one production publish instance, but it's a single point of failure. It's a general best practice to load balance across at least two. Two is sufficient for most websites. If you do this, you'd want to mimic the architecture in CAT.

To answer question 2...

If your code is written, built, and deployed correctly, it should not delete your content. Just make sure you are never deploying anything to /content (to avoid deleting content) and to /libs and most of /etc to avoid overriding platform functionality. AEM/CQ5 is a very open product, so you can do very bad things. But, if you know what not to do you are safe.

Code deployments should typically be done as part of a CRX Content Package, which brings me to...

To answer question 3...

The way we build and deploy code is to have Maven compile the Java, package everything up in a CRX Package, then deploy to the instance using the Package Manager REST API. Adobe provides a Maven Archetype that will facilitate this.

A CRX Package is a file system representation of your content repository, wrapped in what is effectively an annotated Zip file. Your compiled Java code is included in that file system representation, in a folder (to become node) named "config". That compiled Java is an OSGi bundle, which is an annotated JAR. When CRX Package Manager deploys all those nodes to the system, OSGi accepts the bundle, assuming it's valid. This is why you can do "hot" deployments of live, production AEM/CQ5 instances, with very little risk.

So...

This is a very high level answer to some very big topics. I encourage you to do a lot more research before you set this up. There are many good blog posts and documentation pages out there to help you get this set up according to best practice. Good luck!