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In every Sitecore project we end up with several Support Packages.
In the past (pre 9.x era) we manually installed those on the Sitecore environments (CM, CD).

But this is a hell to maintain!
Every developer needs to be aware of which package was installed where (got documented). And needs to know if that package has to be deployed locally to their development environment.

We came up with a solution where all support packages are included in our git repository in a separate folder.
And we add a task to our deployment pipelines - either Octopus or Azure Devops - to unzip those packages.

Is this the recommended way to include Support Packages and have them available for an easy deploy?

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  • What type of deployment are you doing ? It looks like a blue / green deployment from your description. My only concern is that if a support package comes with a database items, and you might need to find a way to perform a databaseless operation. This may not be a real thing however as most support packages are just a pure zip with only files inside. – Vincent Lui Jan 31 '19 at 10:53
  • Deployment depends on the project. I'm not really concerned with the database changes. Didn't come across this before. – Koen Heye Feb 1 '19 at 19:46
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Is this the recommended way to include Support Packages and have them available for an easy deploy?

The answer to your question will depend on your development environment and team setting. Below is the solution that works with our development process.

We include support packages in our git repo and Visual Studio solution. So for CI/CD we do not have any special steps for support packages, since they are built and output as any other DLL and configuration is.

Reason for this is local development. We want to make sure that local installations include support packages.

Including support packages in Visual Studio solution also allows us to review support package changes in Pull Requests, same as any other code change.

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    I do the same too. My team also maintains a list of sitecore support packages in a text file inside the repo. As some of the support packages will need to be removed during upgrades. – Vincent Lui Jan 31 '19 at 20:32
  • Vincent, similarly, we keep a markdown file in the repo to track customization for Sitecore – Alex S Jan 31 '19 at 21:26
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    +1 for this, same as you Alex S. We include support configs at project level and reference assemblies from /lib. The repo has some docs that state all patches used, why, and if we know when they can be removed (e.g. "Can be removed when upgraded to 9.0 Update 2") – Kasaku Feb 1 '19 at 11:56

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