Cannot publish item with an error " The publishing service is not running. Please contact your system administrator."

Question

I have installed Sitecore Publishing Service 4.3.0 and its counterpart module (Sitecore Publishing Module 10.0.0.0 rev. r00568.2697.zip) into a new clean Sitecore 10.0 XP0 by following the official manual. There were no problems while following it, all the steps seemed logical and worked as expected.

The problem: unless I manually run the executable (Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe) - no publishing happens. Once I manually run it - it loads in command prompt with default big "Publish" console-art and the message to press Ctrl+C to shut down. While this command prompt is open - publishing works well and items appear on the web from master as they normally should do.

However, when I close this console window, no more publishing happens and I am getting the errors:

What is interesting, the process Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe is running (as it should do) after I trigger a testing request (to http://publishing.service/api/publishing/operations/status getting expected {"status":0} response)

When I then manually run executable, I get two identical processes with one difference that manual runs under my user credentials rather than AppPoolIdentity, which is understandable. Also, one of processes' command line is wrapped with brackets, the other isn't, but these both are acceptable - some processes do have them, others don't. Just in case, I even tried giving app pool Local System account to test if that may be a case of some permissions missing, but the experiment ended that same:

As I mentioned. when I manually run Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe executable (the above process) - publishing works well, the item appears at Publishing Target (web database) and the task is also reflected at Publishing Dashboard.

Logs: look clear - no errors. At least nothing looking criminal to my eyes.

Web.config file within publishing service points to the correct executable. I also tried "debloating" the config as prompted at the bottom of this blog post, but debloating also did not fix the problem

Service installation steps, as I did it:

1. Created a folder and extracted everything into
2. Provided connection strings to master, web, and core databases by .\Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe configuration setconnectionstring core <value>
3. .\Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe configuration set Sitecore:Publishing:InstanceName --value <PS_INSTANCENAME>
4. \Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe schema upgrade --force
5. .\Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe IIS install --hosts --force

As for the counterpart module, I have made a config patch where referenced PublishingService.UrlRoot as described in the manual.

Literary, lost my head out of this issue. Am I missing something important?

Answer 1

I faced the similar issue with Sitecore 10.1 and Sitecore Publishing Service 5.0.0.

I started the publishing service host service by using following command:

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host.exe

After running this command, I am not seeing this error and able to publish the items from CMS.