How to Create a Composite NodeStore with the Feature Model

About this How-To

• Back To: How to Create a Custom Feature Model Project
• Back to the: Feature Model How-To Guide

Prerequisites

In order to follow this how-to you'll need the following on your computer:

• Java 8
• Maven 3
• Bash shell

What's the Composite NodeStore

A Composite NodeStore is a repository composed of two or more nodestores. The nodestores work together to provide a single logical repository. Like a UNIX file system, each nodestore acts similar to file system mount points. For example, you can mount the /content node as read-write and the /apps and /libs nodes as read-only.

Why use a Composite NodeStore

The Composite NodeStore can be used to improve the stability of your site. In general, you can think of a Sling site as consisting of two parts: your content (which changes often) and your application (which changes periodically). Unless there's a scheduled application release, there's very little reason to allow a running Sling instance to be changed from a code/application perspective.

It provides a great way to ensure that application changes are not allowed without an official release, but still allow day-to-day editorial content changes. Some of the benefits of using the Composite NodeStore and separating your content and application concerns are:

• Improve site stability
• Minimize downtime with blue-green deployments
• Use CI/CD pipelines to release immutable versions of your application
• Easily update/rollback your application without impacting your valuable content
• Ensure your site is always up-to-date and current

Explanation on what will happen

Let's take a quick look at what will happen behind the scenes as we work through this tutorial.

1. First, we'll start Sling using a regular nodestore. We'll call this our seed step as it'll allow us to bootstrap our instance with our application code. When we're done with the seeding process, we'll have our application fully populated in the /apps and /libs JCR nodes. These nodes will later become read-only.
2. Once Sling has started for the first time and completed the seeding process, we'll stop the instance.
3. Then, we'll designate the seeded repository as our read-only segment store.
4. Lastly, we'll start Sling in composite mode. When Sling comes up it will create another nodestore, called global that will function as our read-write portion of the repository. At this point, your application can't be changed while the Sling instance is running.

Step 1: Obtain the Kickstarter module

Build the Kickstarter and install it into your local Maven repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/apache/sling-org-apache-sling-kickstart.git
$ cd sling-org-apache-sling-kickstart
$ mvn clean install

Step 2: Initialize (seed) the repository

Start Sling for the first time using the seed creation script.

$ ./bin/create_seed_fm.sh

This script uses the Kickstarter to start Sling with two Feature Models:

1. feature-sling12-two-headed.json - Our main Feature Model. Sling Feature Model without a NodeStore
2. feature-two-headed-seed.json - Additional Feature Model. Feature Model with a single NodeStore

When you see the line below, Sling has been fully initialized and should be safely stopped by entering <CTRC>+C.

ESAPI: SUCCESSFULLY LOADED validation.properties via the CLASSPATH from '/ (root)'...

Step 3: Start Sling using the Composite NodeStore

Now, let's start Sling a second time using the Composite NodeStore.

$ ./bin/run_composite_fm.sh

Step 4: Verify read-only and read-write nodes

1. Let's start by making a post request and add a JCR property to the /content node.

$ curl -s -v -u admin:admin -FtestProperty='I can write to the content node' \
      'http://localhost:8080/content/slingshot' > /dev/null
...
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...

Since this is a read-write repository path, you should receive an HTTP 200 OK response and be able to write to a property called testProperty with the value I can write to the content node on the /content/slingshot node.

2. Now, let's try the same test, but let's attempt to write to a read-only node.

$ curl -s -v -u admin:admin -FtestProperty='I cannot write to the apps node' \
      'http://localhost:8080/apps/slingshot' > /dev/null
...
< HTTP/1.1 500 Server Error
...

You should now receive an HTTP 500 error response. So, even as the admin user you can't write to the /apps section of the repository.

Mission Accomplished

If you stick with us, we'll show you how to convert an existing Provisioning Model to a Feature Model..