Here we go. I’m starting from the very beginning. I have already dabbled in running Sitecore in containers over the past couple years. But this has all been changing very rapidly and I wanted to get the full experience, so I’m following along with the “Run your first Sitecore instance” doc.
I already went through “Set up the environment“, but all I needed to do there was install an update for Docker Desktop. I cloned the docker-examples repo and ran init.ps1 to specify my license file and set the admin password to “b” ❤. I ran into my first issue when I ran docker-compose up -d and got error messages about an unhealthy container. My first few experiences with Sitecore and docker, which started before Sitecore officially supported docker were less than stable. So I figured.. “eh, clean up and try again.” Then,
“Hmmm same error.”
I opened Docker Desktop and found that the sitecore-xp0_id_1 container (identity server) had immediately exited. The logs showed an error about an invalid or expired license file. I swore I had already updated my license file this year, but I went and grabbed my 2022 license again, and reran the init script before trying to bring the containers up again. Again, I got the same license error. WTF?!
Reran the init script a couple more times with the same results and a fair amount of swearing. Finally, I thought to check the environment variables on my machine. There it was. A user level environment variable named SITECORE_LICENSE that had probably been there since I experimented with the community supported docker images a year or two ago. After deleting that environment variable and restarting my Windows Terminal, I was able to successfully bring up the containers. Yay!
Wait… What?
While writing this post, I realized that I had been following the 10.0 docs. I just flipped over to the 10.2 version of the docs (BTW, Sitecore, if you’re reading, please make it easier to switch between product versions in the doc site. Thanks) and they don’t even mention the docker-examples repo. Instead it uses a “Sitecore Container Deployment Package”. Oh FFS… I need to go to bed…