AEM Dispatcher Configurations - symlinks | AEM Community Blog Seeding

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AEM Dispatcher Configurations - symlinks by Stories by Albin Issac on Medium

Abstract

The AMS 2.0 Dispatcher standard/AEM as Cloud Dispatcher configurations enable modularized dispatcher configurations and also simplify and remove the duplicate configuration.

As shown in the below diagram, one of the major changes is using symlinks to avoid duplication of farm files and host configurations. In earlier versions, the farm and vhost files are duplicated under available and enabled folders, this leads to duplication and overhead for management — the changes should be applied in two different files.

In AMS 2.0/AEM as Cloud Service dispatcher configurations, the files are managed through symlinks, the actual file is inside the available folder, and symlink created to the file under the enabled folder. The symlinks are going to be relative to the available folder — ../available_vhosts/test.vhost

e.g
~/dispatcher/src/conf.d/available_vhots/test.vhost — original
~/dispatcher/src/conf.d/enabled_vhosts/test.vhost — symlink
~/dispatcher/src/conf.dispatcher.d/available_farms/test_farm.any— original
/dispatcher/src/conf.dispatcher.d/enabled_farms/test_farm.any — symlink

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AEM Dispatcher Configurations - symlinks

Q&A

Please use this thread to ask the related questions.

[GK-007]

Hello,

We are in process of converting our existing Dispatcher configurations to AMS 2.0 Dispatcher Standard.I would like to understand one point that should we always create Symlink for the available confs and we need to follow this process strictly?Right now ,we have copied the confs. in available folder to enable folder and deployed ,aboe to deploy from Cloud Manager.Will it cause any issues if we follow this process ,recognizing virtual hosts?

How to create Symlink for the Dispatcher configured in Windows system locally?Any tools are available?

Please clarify.

Thanks,

GK

[Rohan_Garg]

Hi,

For windows 11 - the mklink utility is the best option.

Syntax — mklink <link> <target>

I was able to create symlinks directly from cmd (admin access) for enabled vhosts.

However, In AEM RELEASE:

2022.6.7904.20220629T070041Z

The symlinks created on windows machine and pushed to cloud give the below error - 

/tmp/dispatcher/unzippedConfiguration/conf.dispatcher.d/enabled_farms/default.farm: appears to be a windows (pseudo) symlink but this OS does not support these. Please commit a correct symlink: ../available_farms/default.farm

The fix was to generate symlink on WSL application (Debian, Ubuntu both work).

Hope this helps!

[Rohan_Garg]

Hi All,

Just to add some insights into this blog. 

The blog quoted the below - 

The mklink utility was working without any issues for me, able to deploy the dispatcher configurations to AMS server with the symlink created through mklink in windows machine(easy to use the utility in windows and not require any additional configurations — my recommended option for windows)

Windows generated symlinks however generated the below error on AEM Release - 2022.6.7904.20220629T070041Z :-

/tmp/dispatcher/unzippedConfiguration/conf.dispatcher.d/enabled_farms/default.farm: appears to be a windows (pseudo) symlink but this OS does not support these. Please commit a correct symlink: ../available_farms/default.farm

The fix was to generate symlink on WSL application as discussed in the blog (Debian, Ubuntu both work).