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Sunday, January 31, 2021

CRX Cleaner and IntelliVault Plugins for AEM

 I have always been fond of plugins and tools which makes my life easier. In this blog, I will talk about two of my favorite plugins in IntellijIdea which makes my AEM development easier: CRX Cleaner and IntelliVault.

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CRX Cleaner:  Recently a new plugin has been added in my development life which is CRX Cleaner. This is an IntellijIdea Plugin and absolutely free.


Use Case: In AEM, while syncing the content, the syncing of workflows, templates, policies or sometimes pages also need to be done from AEM to the codebase repository.


While syncing via packages/ plugin, it pulls all the unwanted properties like jcr:modifiedBy, jcr:modifiedDate, jcr:createdBy etc in the code base and makes git pushes really messy. Before this plugin, either I just avoided these properties and pushed the code having these properties or I used to clean up by myself one by one which was a super tedious task.


I installed this plugin in intellijidea, and now just one short key Ctrl+ALT+L does the magic for me. You just select the whole file and hit the short key. Super easy and handy.

How to install: Go to File-> Plugins-> search for CRX Cleaner-> Install


IntelliVault

I believe most of the people working in AEM are aware about this plugin, but for those that aren’t I highly recommend it.

Use Case: This plugin helps to sync the content from AEM to code repository or from repository to AEM.

Many times you just keep on changing the crx at so many places. So while moving the changes to the code repo, either make the package of all changes from CRX or sync the content with the help of this plugin.


To make this tool work, vault-cli dependency is needed. vault-cli zip initially used to come with the AEM Jar and it was easy to configure it, but it was removed (/crx-quickstart/opt/fileVault) in the later versions of AEM. 


So I need to find the vault-cli.zip and do the configuration. As there are many versions of vault-cli and I noticed for some versions, the syncing doesn’t work sometimes, This additional task always makes me lazy and I end up making packages to sync my code instead of making this tool work.


So If you are lazy like me, just click the link https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/jackrabbit/vault/vault-cli/3.4.6/vault-cli-3.4.6-bin.zip  to download the vault zip and extract it to some place. This vault version works for me perfectly.


Now install the fileVault Plugin in IntellijIdea and after you install this, the plugin will start appearing in the Tools section. Click on FileVault and configure the Vault directory path pointing to the bin folder following the path where you extracted your zip, i.e., “ROOT_DIRECTORY\vault-cli-3.4.6-bin\vault-cli-3.4.6\bin”

When done with the configuration, you can start pushing and pulling the content.


Hope you find it a good read.