Deploying a minimal HCL Commerce+ environment

Best practice for installing HCL Commerce+ is to start with a preconfigured 'minimal environment.' To install Commerce+, first, set up and test the minimal environment, then plan for your production environment using your own organization's IT and business experts.

Installing the minimal environment first will ultimately save you time. This setup allows you to validate the system on your servers and in your network environment. It serves as a test environment where you can learn how Commerce+ works. You can excplore user roles, ensure the system is secure, adapt your database, and test other features that will be important in defining your production environment.

This deployment path starts with a test environment that uses Elastic as the default search solution, and the default Helm chart. By using the HCL-provided Helm charts you can deploy HCL Commerce+ containers and Vault on a Kubernetes cluster, assuming a basic authoring topology.

  • Purpose: Establish a minimal authoring environment to test HCL Commerce+ features and integrations.
  • Scope: Targets an authoring setup with Elastic as the default search solution.
  • Approach: Uses HCL-provided Helm charts for deployment on Kubernetes.
    • hcl-commerce-vault-helmchart: Sets up Vault for managing certificates.
    • hcl-commerce-helmchart: Deploys the Commerce+ application containers for the authoring environment.

The sytem uses Vault to manage environment data, such as the spiuser password and issue certificates for HCL Commerce+ containers. The install scripts will create HCL Commerce+ containers such as ts-app, store-web, query-app, tailored for authoring, and including Elastic.

Learning the system by installing and configuring a minimal environment will help you with your next step, which will be to implement a production system that satisfies your particular requirements.

Procedure

  1. In the ../tasks/tig_download.html#eAssemblies__latestimages table, select the Docker images that you want to download and complete the following step:
    1. For each Docker image (.tgz) file, open a terminal to load Docker images from a tar archive file into your local Docker registry using the docker load command, for example:
      docker load -i HCL_Commerce+_Y.MM.DD.0_Transaction_Server_x86-64.tgz
      This command loads the image so you can push it to a registry, where HCL_Commerce+_YY.MM.DD.0_Transaction_Server_x86-64.tgz is the archive file name.
      Tip: If you manage the private Docker registry or Git repository for your organization, consider to push new images or repositories there This allows developers to pull the images or repositories from your shared environment, bypassing direct downloads from My HCLSoftware portal.
    For more information about the docker load commands, see the docker image load command in the documentation for Docker.
  2. After loading, push the images to a registry so that the Kubernetes cluster can use them (for example, via the command docker push <registry>/image:tag).
  3. Use the Helm chart bundle to set up Commerce+:
    helm install commerce HCL_Commerce_Helm_charts -n commerce
  4. The Helm chart pulls the images from the registry and starts them as applications on Kubernetes.