Deployment process

Prior to completing these steps please be sure to review and complete any appropriate pre-requisites from the following two articles:

Preparing for an B2B Commerce Cloud Project
B2B Commerce Cloud Environment Developer Setup

Each of the steps in this article reference a step in the following process, which is also referred to in the B2B Commerce Cloud Infrastructure Deployment article.

Updates to the deployment process

Deployments through Mission Control for B2B Commerce Cloud are here! Customers in containerized environments can deploy in significantly wider windows than our previous Wednesday and Friday deploy times.

What's new

Starting on August 8, 2022, new deployment requests for B2B Commerce customers in containers are handled by the Optimizely Service Desk. Requests entered before this date will still be done by the Optimizely B2B SRE team.

Extensions-only deployments will be available through the Service Desk request in the hours set forth in your Service Level Agreement.

For customers on Standard and Enhanced Support, this is 12/5, 8AM-8PM EST/CET/AEDT, depending on region.
For customers on Premium Support, this is 24/7/365 with a target response time of six hours.
Base Code or Base Code + Extensions deployments will be available via request all day during Central Time business hours (8AM-5PM, M-F). These dates ARE affected by US Holidays.

What's not changing

You can continue to utilize the B2B deployment form for any deployments.

Update Local Sandbox to Latest Version

It is important to work with the latest sandbox version. Production branch should always mirror what is currently deployed to the live site. It is possible to use selective merging when testing of specific B2B Commerce Cloud versions is necessary.

Git Fetch will retrieve all of the commits in the upstream repository. This will not change local repository files but makes them available to the developer. Git Pull is a combination of a fetch and merge to current version.

For example, retrieve the latest versions and update the local repository:

git checkout Sandbox
git fetch upstream --tags
git merge 4.3.2.12345

Add or Update Files

Open git bash or command line
git checkout sandbox
Make any changes to the projects

However, when you make changes within your Extensions project, there is one extra step you must take after building your project and solution. The Extensions.dll file that is produced from the build, must be placed inside the /dist directory found in your local copy of B2B Commerce. This is the directory that will be searched in order to find server-side extensions. The Extensions.dll file will be deployed to your sandbox environment by an internal Optimizely process. A PowerShell script is included in the /dist directory that will build your Extensions project in Release mode and copy the Extensions.dll to the appropriate place for deployment. You can have Visual Studio execute the PowerShell script automatically with a build script. Copy the following script and use it as a post-build script for the Extensions project.

powershell.exe -command "& { $(SolutionDir)..\dist\buildExtensions.ps1 }"

Add Files to Sandbox Branch

Add all of the (changed) files to the sandbox branch. Commit all the changes of the sandbox branch to the local git repository.

git add -all
git commit -m "First commit"

Push the Sandbox Brand to B2B Commerce Cloud

The process to push changes to sandbox is the same for production except the changes are not automatically applied in production. If a branch doesn't exist on the remote repository it will be created upon executing the git push command.

Open git bash or command line
git checkout sandbox
git push -u origin sandbox

Configure the Website to Use the Theme

In the B2B Commerce Cloud Admin Console configure the website to use the newly configured theme.

Go and log into the [projectidentifier].insitesandbox.com/admin
Go to Websites and Edit the website
Configure the Theme drop down and select the desired theme.

The Site is Live

Go to the [projectidentifier].insitesandbox.com URL and review the website.