CQ Development Team Server "In A Box"

This Blueprint details an example server configuration that is publicly available to help teams working with CQ get up and running quickly with a development environment that will go a long way to ensuring a successful project.

Motivation

As documented in Necessary Development Environment Elements for a Successful CQ Project, there are a lot of elements to provision, configure and integrate correctly to enable a successful CQ team development project. An environment that is missing some of these elements, or where these elements are not well configured or integrated can impede the progress of a development team throughout an entire project.

This is particularly critical for consulting companies that work with many clients on many different CQ projects where a new CQ team environment needs to be established each time.

Therefore, the example server is intended to demonstrate a well configured team development environment with all of the elements present and integrated with each other. Teams can use this example server as a starting point that can quickly be customized to their own specific environment requirements.

Technical Details

The example server is packaged as an Open Virtualization Format archive. This format can be used with Oracle's VirtualBox tool (free) as well as with many of VMware's products among others. Check your virtualization product documentation for further support information.

The server itself is running Ubuntu Server 64bit 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

The server is configured with all of the tools recommended on the Necessary Development Environment Elements for a Successful CQ Project page.

Caveats

This is intended to be an example and a starting point, it is not a plug-n-play solution for every team.

Specifically, the following issues should be addressed by any team intending to use the example:

• the server is intended to be run in a secure intranet-like environment. as a result, the server has not been hardened in any way and is almost certainly at risk if you deploy it outside your firewall on an open network
• you will need to log into the system via SSH and manipulate system resources using the command line. if you are not comfortable with this, get some help
• there is no backup process configured. if you are going to use this for a real-world project, please, please, please set up some kind of back up process. you could backup the entire virtual machine, or you could just back up parts of the machine, like the SVN and Nexus repositories. just make sure you are doing at least one of those

Download

The server archive can be downloaded here (it is a little under 1GB).

Once you have downloaded the server and have it up and running in your virtualization environment, take a look at these documents:

• CQ Development Team Server - First Steps
• CQ Development Team Server - How to Use

Further Assistance

If you require technical support in planning and setting up your CQ team development environment, please reach out to the team at Headwire (headwire.com or send an email), they do this kind of thing for a living.