How I managed to install Sitecore 9.3 XP + SXA + Styleguide SXA

Monday 1st June 2020.

Disclaimer: I’m not a Sitecore developer and I don’t have a PC at home running Windows. I needed to have my very own local instance of Sitecore to test and develop features of my Google Chrome Extension for Sitecore, from my Mac ๐Ÿ™‚

Even though I don’t have any experience with Microsoft server things, I have years of experience with Linux servers, command-line interface, and VM (Rackspace, AWS). It helped me a lot here. As I’m not a Microsoft tech guy, I tried to describe all the steps and provide the necessary information to help beginners (in particular, but not only reserved to them) to set up their own Sitecore local instance.

Introduction

This guide will describe how to setup Sitecore 9.3 XP + SXA and Styleguide via SIA tool (Sitecore Installation Assistant) on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019 version. I tested it successfully on various configurations like:

  1. macOS Catalina + Parallel Desktop 15 + Windows 10 Home
  2. Azure VM + Windows Server 2019
  3. OVH Cloud VPS + Windows Server 2019

On a side note, I initially thought to reach my goal with a Sitecore Docker Image on an Azure VM instance, which I eventually managed to get it done after facing many roadblocks… As I’m not going to talk about Docker here, if you really want to try Docker, you can still take a look at this great tutorial and my comments at the bottom of it.

Let’s start!

First of all, make sure yo have the following prerequisites full-filled:

  1. A https://dev.sitecore.com account
  2. A valid Sitecore license (licence.xml)
  3. A Windows machine with 8gb of Ram as a minimum

Step by step guide

Step 1: Download resources

  1. Open a Powershell console (admin mode)
  2. Install Chocolatey (Guide here) (Note: Coming from the Linux world, I was really happy to discover that Windows have great package manager tools similar to apt-get on Linux)
  3. Download and extract Sitecore 9.3 Graphical setup package for XP Single
  4. Download and extract Styleguide SXA latest release (don’t clone or download repo! get a ZIP package from the Github Releases)

Note: Put all your downloaded files under C:\ volume. If you are on a Mac with Parallels Desktop, make sure you are not installing from a Virtual folder (\\mac\\....). Eventually, you should have something like the this:

Step 2: Install SQL Server with Chocolatey

  1. Install SQL 2019 server: in a Powershell console, enter choco install sql-server-2019
  2. Install SQL Server Manager Studio: enter choco install sql-server-management-studio

Step 3: Configure SQL Server

  1. Enable Windows Authenticate and SQL authentication to your SQL SERVER. Open SQL Server Manager Studio, connect with Windows Authenticate. Once logged in, right-click on your Server name > Properties > Security and check SQL Server (Fig. 1)
  2. Under Security > Logins, right-click on sa account to change default password under โ€œGeneralโ€ and Enable login under โ€œStatusโ€ (Fig. 2)
  3. Restart your SQL server, right-click on Server name > Restart (Fig. 3)
  4. Write down somewhere your SQL server name, it will be needed later during Sitecore Installation.
Figure 1
Figure 3

Step 4: Install IIS (optional)

  1. If you are not on a Windows Server edition, go install IIS. Follow this guide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms181052(v=vs.80)
  2. Once installed, start IIS Manager and open your server > Sites on the left tree
  3. If you see default website, right-click and delete

Step 5: Install Sitecore with SIA

  1. From your Sitecore SIA folder, click setup.exe, the Sitecore Installer Assistant will open
  2. Follow the steps as described below

Step 6: Open Sitecore

  1. After 30min to 1h, you should see a successful installation message
  2. Go to https://sc93sc.dev.local/sitecore
  3. Login with Admin / {password you choose during installation}
  4. Go to Control Panel > Install a Package (Fig. 1)
  5. Upload your Styleguide SXA Package (should be extracted from the zip file downloaded from Github)
  6. Open this package, click next, accept the license, and wait. (Fig. 2)
  7. Once installed, go to Indexing Manager and rebuild indexes (Fig. 3)
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3

And voila!

Now go to https://sc93sc.dev.local/styleguide/ and you should see Styleguide SXA website running under your own Sitecore instance. Don’t forget to go to Google Web Store and install my Sitecore Extension to get the most out of your Sitecore installation ๐Ÿ˜‰

Don’t hesitate to leave me a message on Twitter to let me know how it went for you! ๐Ÿ™‚

Read next: Install Sitecore Horizon on 9.3