Sitecore for Developers
Track Sitecore Configuration File Changes
Greetings Readers,This post applies to Sitecore Version 8.0 Update 3 (150427) and higher.Did you ever feel a need to track your sitecore config changes ?Did you want to know what were the configuration at a certain time ?Did you want to know how your caches were performing or the rendering statistics at a certain time ?If the answer is yes, then this post is for you, Sitecore out of the box from version 8.0 Update 3 has a Sitecore Configuration dumping feature which creates and dumps a zip file of the configuration in your data folder.Here is the processor which does the magic[code language="xml"] <!-- DUMP CONFIGURATION FILES Dumps the specified configuration files and allows you to monitor all the changes that are made to the configuration files. Supported child nodes: DumpFolder: The path to the root folder where the config file dump is stored. Each config file dump is stored in a folder or a zip archive. The name of the folder or zip archive has the following format: {date}.{time}. Default value: $(dataFolder)/diagnostics/configuration_history Zip: Boolean value that determines whether each dump should be zipped. Default value: true files: Contains <file> nodes where the "path" attribute value is the path to the configuration file or the folder that should be dumped. --> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.Loader.DumpConfigurationFiles, Sitecore.Kernel" patch:source="Sitecore.Diagnostics.config"> <dumpFolder>$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/configuration_history</dumpFolder> <zip>true</zip> <files hint="raw:AddPath"> <file path="/App_Config" /> <file path="/Web.config" /> <file path="/Global.asax" /> <file path="/sitecore/shell/sitecore.version.xml" /> </files> </processor>[/code]The above processor is defined in the Sitecore.Diagnostics.config configuration include file and supports various configuration settings such as
- Add custom files which needs to be tracked (This is great where you can track almost any file which you want)
- Modify the location for storing configuration files (Default : $(dataFolder)/diagnostics/configuration_history)
- Support for Zip compression
Note : Sitecore cleans up the above folder with items which are older than 30 days, you can increase of remove the automatic clean up from the Sitecore.Diagnostics.config file[code language="xml"] <scheduling> <agent type="Sitecore.Tasks.CleanupAgent"> <files> <remove folder="$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/configuration_history" pattern="*" maxAge="30.00:00:00" recursive="false" /> <remove folder="$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/health_monitor" pattern="*.*" maxAge="07.00:00:00" recursive="false" /> </files> </agent> </scheduling>[/code]Additionally Sitecore also does periodic dumping data from /sitecore/admin/stats.aspx and /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx pages to the file system The location and format of the log file can be configured as part of the processor configuration. By default, dump files are stored in /diagnostics/health_monitor in the Data folder.[code language="xml"] <healthMonitor> <!-- Dumps the information that the /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx page contains --> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HealthMonitor.HealthMonitor, Sitecore.Kernel" method="DumpAllCacheStatus"> <dumpFile>$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/health_monitor/CacheStatus.{date}.{time}.html</dumpFile> </processor> <!-- Dumps the information that the /sitecore/admin/stats.aspx page contains --> <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HealthMonitor.HealthMonitor, Sitecore.Kernel" method="DumpRenderingsStatistics"> <dumpFile>$(dataFolder)/diagnostics/health_monitor/RenderingsStatistics.{date}.{time}.html</dumpFile> </processor> </healthMonitor>[/code]This gives us a chance to travel back in time and look at our site configuration files, rendering statistics, cache status etc...Here is a snapshot of the folder structure as the data is dumpedConfiguration Files Dump
There you go, hopefully I gave us all developers one more reason to LOVE SITECORE..... :)