AEM Container Image

This container image is designed to run Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud SDK within a container. It offers a basic AEM instance with minimal configuration. The instance type (author or publish) is determined at runtime through an environment variable. Additionally, it is built as a multi-architecture image (amd64, arm64) to ensure compatibility across various operating systems and platforms.

Note: All the commands demonstrated on this page use Podman. However, the same commands can also be used with Docker if you prefer.

How To Use

You must first log in to your container registry. In the examples below, we will demonstrate using the GitHub Container Registry.

export TOKEN=***
export USER=<your github username here>
export REGISTRY=ghcr.io

echo ${TOKEN} | podman login ${REGISTRY} -u ${USER} --password-stdin

Next, you can pull the images from your container registry. We differentiate between a stable version, which represents the production installation, and the latest version, which aligns with the Cloud Manager development environment (and potentially RDE). This approach allows you to test your code with the upcoming SDK version before upgrading your production environment.

podman pull ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:stable
podman pull ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:2024.10

podman pull ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:latest
podman pull ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:2024.11

Once you have successfully pulled the container image from the registry, you can proceed to start the containers. Be sure to adjust the arguments to suit your specific requirements.

podman run -d \
  --name author \
  -e TZ="Europe/Zurich" \
  -e JVM_XMX="4g" \
  -e JVM_META="512m" \
  -e AEM_RUNMODE="author,aemdev" \
  -p 4502:4500 \
  -p 14502:30303 \
  -p 24502:8686 \
  -v $(pwd)/volume/repo:/aem/crx-quickstart/repository \
  -v $(pwd)/volume/logs:/aem/crx-quickstart/logs \
  -v $(pwd)/volume/install:/aem/crx-quickstart/install \
  ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:latest

Note: When running the container in Podman, make sure the Podman VM was initialized with enough resources. By default it only acquires 2GB, which is not enough to run AEM.

podman mmachine init --memory 16384

Port	Description
4500	HTTP port
30303	Debug port
8686	JMX port

After the containers are created, you can use the following commands to start or stop them.

podman start author
podman stop author -t 180

When stopping the AEM container, ensure that the wait time is set to an appropriate value (e.g., 180 seconds). By default, Podman/Docker only waits 10 seconds for a container to stop before forcibly killing it. This abrupt termination can cause issues with the container, so it’s important to avoid this by allowing sufficient time for the container to shut down gracefully.

How To Build

Before building the image, ensure that the SDK quickstart JAR file is located at ./tmp/aem-sdk-quickstart.jar and the license file is available at ./tmp/license.properties. These files will be picked up by the Dockerfile and included in the image. Once these prerequisites are met, you can build the image using the following command.

TEMURIN_VERSION=11.0.25_9-jre

podman build \
  --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 \
  --build-arg PKG="curl wget" \
  --build-arg LOCALE="en_GB.UTF-8" \
  --build-arg TEMURIN_VERSION="${TEMURIN_VERSION}" \
  --manifest ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:2024.11 \
  .

All build arguments are optional. The table below provides a quick overview of the available options:

Argument	Description	Default
PKG	A space-separated list of OS packages to install
LOCALE	Set the system locate.	en_GB.UTF-8
TEMURIN_VERSION	The Temurin container image to run AEM on.	11.0.25_9-jre

Some arguments in scripts/start.sh are hard-coded and applied to both the JVM and AEM, and they cannot be modified directly. If these settings don't suit your needs, you can either customize the bash script to your preferences or make the arguments configurable as build parameters.

The command above creates a multi-architecture image supporting both amd64 and arm64 architectures. If you are building a similar image using Docker, consider using Docker Buildx for multi-architecture support.

The last action is to push the container image to your container registry.

podman manifest push ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:2024.11
podman manifest push ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:2024.11 ${REGISTRY}/${USER}/aem:latest

Build Pipeline Example

The pipeline scripts at .github/workflows/podman.yml and .github/workflows/docker.yml show a GH build pipeline that pulls data from a remote artifact repository (Nexus OSS) and prepares them for the use in the build pipeline. The following JSON snippet illustrates the structure of version.json. This file is downloaded first and is used to determine the paths of the files to be retrieved:

{
  "license": "/aem/lic/license.properties",
  "stable": {
    "jdk": "11.0.25_9-jre",
    "sdk": "/aem/sdk/bin/aem-sdk-2024.10.18459.20241031T210302Z-241000.zip",
    "pkg": [
      "/aem/sdk/packages/universal-editor-service-vprod-20241118150153.zip"
    ]
  },
  "latest": {
    "jdk": "11.0.25_9-jre",
    "sdk": "/aem/sdk/bin/aem-sdk-2024.11.18598.20241113T125352Z-241100.zip",
    "pkg": [
      "/aem/sdk/packages/aem-guides-wknd.all-3.2.0.zip",
      "/aem/sdk/packages/aem-guides-wknd.ui.content.sample-3.2.0.zip",
      "/aem/sdk/packages/universal-editor-service-vprod-20241118150153.zip"
    ]
  }
}