How to manage deployment of additional packages in a controlled way?

[Sutty100]

I'm looking at how we can manage the deployment of additional packages to AEM through our various environments in a controlled way. We have a few types of packages:

• Library packages e.g. ACS commons
• AEM Framework fixes e.g. Feature packs, hotfixes and service packs

For library packages we are using the content-package-maven-plugin and setting these as sub packages. The slightly annoying thing with this is that they install every time they are deployed even if the package is already on the environment (not sure if there is something to prevent this?)

For AEM Framework fixes I'm not sure how best to approach this, we certainly don't want to reinstall service packs every time we deploy but I also want to ensure any changes to environments are commited and go through our standard deployment pipeline rather than a sys admin logging onto the AEM instances and ad-hoc deploying. I'm very keen to ensure as much automation and as little window for human mistakes e.g. forgetting to deploy fix pack X for the release and to make use of our exisiting Jenkins deployment pipeline.

[smacdonald2008]

I am checking with the support team recommendations here. 

Typically - to work with hotfixes, an AEM Admin installs by following this Hotfix KB: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/index/hotfixes.html

[daniel_henriqu1]

I'm very interested in the answer for this one 

I've tried to use /crx-quickstart/install to achieve that, but there is no way of enforcing the installation order of JCR packages (you can only control the start level of bundles) and apparently JCR packages may be installed in parallel by the OSGi installer  

As a side note, I've been working on a tool to read/load JCR packages from multiple sources and install them in a preconfigured order.
This way we would be able to configure the package list just once and reuse it for all our environments.

Regards,

Daniel.

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

Supported stated: 

Sorry no we don’t have anything like that.  This third party maven plugin might help them though:

http://wcm.io/tooling/maven/plugins/wcmio-content-package-maven-plugin/usage.html