Working with Unicorn and Sitecore CLI

 In this article we learn about some challenges I faced while working with both Unicorn and Sitecore CLI.

On my project we are at a stage in which a wholesale change from Unicorn to Sitecore CLI is not an option. There is however an advantage of updating the deployment pipeline to leverage the IAR plugin for the Sitecore CLI. Our current setup takes upwards of 30 minutes to complete the deployment. Imagine a folder of 40k Unicorn items and trying to zip that up, cleaning the old ones, extracting on the destination server, and then syncing items after every deployment. Deployment nights are exhausting.

Here is a brief list of issues I uncovered along the way.

• Minor issues in YAML compatibility between Unicorn/Rainbow and Sitecore Rainbow.
• Content of YAML may cause the creation of Items in Sitecore without a language version.

YAML Compatibility

The majority of the team is still relying on Unicorn to serialize content to disk. If you use Sitecore CLI to also serialize items, including overwriting files previously serialized by Unicorn, you'll notice some fields missing.

In the following partial example, if this was generated by the Sitecore CLI the database name would be missing which could cause an issue with Unicorn.

In the following partial example, if this was generated by the Sitecore CLI the Multilist field type would be missing which causes Unicorn to sync the fields without the pipe delimiter.

Recommendation: If you are going to also use the Sitecore CLI to serialize items, take note of what fields go missing and make sure they are added back.

The command used with the Sitecore CLI to generate IAR items would be one of the following:

• Sitecore CLI Module -> dotnet sitecore itemres create -o _out/scms -i Scms.* --overwrite
• Unicorn Folder -> dotnet sitecore itemres unicorn -o _out/scms -p "../Serialization" --overwrite

Language Versions

Most installations of Unicorn will exclude several fields such as __Revision. This missing from the serialized items (both in IAR form and YAML) may cause the Sitecore Publishing Service to improperly delete items during publishing. Due to this issue both SXA and SPE now include the revisions in the IAR files.

Another interesting discovery is how few fields you may see listed under each language version. In some files generated by Unicorn I noticed no fields listed under the version. Not sure if this was a mistake during developers merging or something else.

In other cases I found by excluding fields in the sitecore.json as seen in the official docs the YAML serialization and IAR generation will result in fields missing as well. The one time I actually read the manual I end up introducing an issue. (sitecore.json fields removed for brevity)

With the above configuration all the fields serialized are excluded when interacting with the Sitecore CLI. This certainly becomes an issue for items without other fields (like folders).

No fields equals no language version. No Language version equals a broken SPS. Kittens will cry. Ice cream will melt.

Recommendation: Update Unicorn.config to serialize with the __Revision field and then reserialize everything. An issue was opened with Unicorn to alter the patching behavior but for now you may wish to make the change directly for now by manually commenting out the line in the file here.

Run the following SPE report for finding problematic items. Uncomment the section related to language versions missing.