Installation

Xperience by Kentico is a content and digital experience management system built on the .NET platform. For an overview of the system and its features, read our product introduction.

Xperience provides boilerplate .NET projects that are distributed as .NET project templates and installed via the .NET command-line tool (included with the .NET SDK).

Install an Xperience project:

1. Familiarize yourself with the System requirements – make sure the target machine meets the minimum hardware requirements, runs a supported operating system, and contains the software that Xperience needs for the installation.
2. Install the project templates package that provides project templates you can use to build your website.
3. Select a project to create from the available project templates.
4. Create the project and the project database.

Install project templates package 

Before creating new projects, you must install the Xperience by Kentico project templates package using the .NET CLI.

Open the command line and run the following command (depending on the .NET SDK version installed on your machine):

dotnet new install kentico.xperience.templates

dotnet new -i kentico.xperience.templates

This installs the latest version of the project templates NuGet package. The package location depends on the operating system.

You can now create Xperience projects based on the project templates.

Available project templates

The following project types are available, each with a different use case:

The template short name of each project type needs to be specified when creating projects using the dotnet new command.

Create a project

Once you have installed the project templates package, you can install projects using the .NET command-line interface. You need to know the template short name for the corresponding project type.

1. Open the command line prompt.

2. Navigate to the location where you want to create the project.

3. Run the following command:

   • Replace <short_name> with the template short name of the project type you want to install. See Available project templates.

   • The -n parameter sets the name of the installed project. See the dotnet new reference to learn more about the command options.

     • It is not recommended to use non-alphanumeric (e.g. space ’ ‘, dot’.’, or underscore ‘_’) characters in the project name.

   • The --cloud parameter installs a boilerplate project suitable for deployment to the SaaS environment. Omit this parameter if you wish to host a self-managed Xperience project.

     Create a project from a template

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       dotnet new <short_name> --cloud -n AcmeWeb
     
       

4. The installed template targets .NET 6. We strongly recommend changing the target framework to .NET 8 before starting development.

5. Install database .NET tools (kentico-xperience-dbmanager) for the project:

   1. You will be asked if you want to install the database tools during the installation of the .NET project (with the dotnet tool restore command).
   2. To install the database tools manually, run the dotnet tool restore command from the project’s root directory.

The command creates the project files and sets up the database tools for the project.

Continue by creating the project database.

Create the project database

Before you can run an Xperience project, create a database and register a license key for the domain you want to use for your application:

1. Obtain a license key for your application and save it in a text file (e.g., license.txt):

   • For deployment to the SaaS environment, you only need a license key for the local development environment. Generate a license key for local development in your Xperience Portal project.
   • For self-managed deployment, see Licensing self-managed Xperience deployment.
   • See Evaluate Xperience by Kentico on how to get a 30 days free evaluation license key for local development.

2. Run the dotnet kentico-xperience-dbmanager command from the root directory of the project:

   The kentico-xperience-dbmanager command is installed when creating a project. Run the dotnet tool restore command from the project’s root directory if the command is unavailable.

   You can also list all command parameters using --help.

   Create project database

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    dotnet kentico-xperience-dbmanager -- -s "<sql_server_name>" -d "<database_name>" -a "<admin_password>" --hash-string-salt "<hash_string_salt>" --license-file "<license_file_path>"
   
    

• Add parameters after the -- syntax separator to pass the parameters directly to the kentico-xperience-dbmanager command and to avoid conflicts with general dotnet parameters.
• Set the -s parameter to your database server name.
• Set the -d parameter to the name of the database.
• Set the -a parameter to the password you want to use for the default administrator account.
• Set the --hash-string-salt parameter to the hash salt value for the Xperience instance:
  • For deployment to the SaaS environment, get the hash salt value from the Xperience Portal Dashboard.
  • For self-managed deployment, skip this parameter.
• Set the --license-file parameter to the path to a text file with the license key. This registers the license key in the Xperience administration.
• If you encounter an error when creating the database, add the --verbose parameter to get more detailed information, including the error’s stack trace.

The command installs and connects a database to your project via the CMSConnectionString application setting (located in the project’s appsettings.json file).

This completes the installation process. Your Xperience project is now ready for Development and Deployment