Use XConnect without certificates (for development)?

Question

It's an recurring issue that certificates cause some setup trouble with (my) development environments.

So it would be nice to use XConnect, for development only, without certificates.

Is it possible to use XConnect without certificates?

Answer 1

Just remove or disable these two files:

\App_Data\Config\sitecore\CoreServices\sc.XConnect.Security.EnforceSSL.xml \App_Data\Config\sitecore\CoreServices\sc.XConnect.Security.EnforceSSLWithCertificateValidation.xml

This is only for the development purposes, of course.

Answer 2

To provide more context around this issue/use case, I have found that these recurring issues often arise when using enterprise PCs that are configured to use a VPN (such as GlobalProtect). Changes to the VPN connection status result in certificates being moved which results in 403 errors in xConnect.

The solution by @roman-klimenko works. Do that. You may also want to perform these additional steps:

1. Go to the xConnect site in IIS and ignore client certificates via the SSL Settings:

2. Verify that all of your xConnect connection strings (users and passwords) work. You can test this via SQL Server Authentication in SSMS:

<add name="messaging" connectionString="user id=messaginguser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_Messaging" />
<add name="processing.engine.storage" connectionString="user id=processingengineuser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_ProcessingEngineStorage" />
<add name="reporting" connectionString="user id=reportinguser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_Reporting" />
<add name="xdb.marketingautomation" connectionString="user id=marketingautomationuser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_MarketingAutomation" />
<add name="xdb.processing.pools" connectionString="user id=poolsuser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_Processing.Pools" />
<add name="xdb.referencedata" connectionString="user id=referencedatauser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_ReferenceData" />
<add name="collection" connectionString="user id=collectionuser;password=xxxxxxxxxx;data source=localhost;Initial Catalog=SC_Xdb.Collection.ShardMapManager" />

3. All of the usual admin tasks:

• Deploy marketing definitions
• Populate Solr Managed Schema
• Reindex
• Restart IIS