The process of copying the assets you created in your ATG Merchandising development environment to a staging or production environment is called deployment. In order to deploy assets, you need to configure your deployment resources to recognize the repositories those assets are associated with. The deployment process requires three copies of each repository that contains deployable assets:
A source repository is a versioned repository you use in ATG Merchandising to edit assets. This repository runs in the development environment and corresponds with the ATG Content Administration database.
A destination repository is an unversioned repository that supports the assets you want to deploy. This repository runs in the development environment and corresponds with the production database.
A target repository is an unversioned repository that supports deployed assets. It corresponds with the database in the environment – staging or production – that you have deployed assets to.
For assets that use out-of-the-box ATG Merchandising repositories, source and destination repositories are already set up for you. Create the target repositories as part of the process for defining your target server outlined in step 2 below.
To configure your deployment resources, follow these steps:
Familiarize yourself with the deployment process by reading the Understanding Deployment chapter of the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.
Set up your target server and database as described in Setting Up Deployment chapter of the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.
If you customized the out-of-the-box repositories, for example, by adding properties to an existing item descriptor, you need to make the same customizations to the corresponding target repository. The out-of-the-box repositories and their locations are the same on the target server as they are in the Content Administration server.
If you have created custom repositories, you need to configure them for deployment as described in Setting Up Deployment chapter of the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.
Add any versioned repositories to the ATG deployment UI that are not already there, including custom repositories and the
RefinementRepositoryused by Search Merchandising and Faceted Search. You add these repositories by creating an/atg/registry/ContentRepositories.propertiesfile located in the local configuration directory (for example,<ATG9dir>/home/localconfig) on your Content Administration server with the following appropriate content. For example:initialRepositories+=\
/atg/search/repository/RefinementRepository_production,Re-assemble, redeploy and restart your application running with the ATG Content Administration server, then add a site as described in the Defining the Deployment Topology section of the Setting Up Deployment chapter of the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.
