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HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
Installing and deploying
Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
Deploying custom changes
With HCL Commerce Version 9.0, you can customize HCL Commerce Docker image with the source code, configurations, and the Docker container start-up logic. Learn how to build Docker images with your customized code and deploy the images (and other changes) to your Docker containers.
Packaging customized code for deployment
The HCL Commerce Build tool (WCB tool) is the tool that you use to build your customizations into input packages. These packages can be used to build new container images and deploy to your runtime environments. If a CI/CD pipeline is implemented, you do not need to concern yourself with deployment.

Documentation
HCL Commerce is a high-availability, highly scalable and customizable e-commerce platform. Able to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, HCL Commerce allows you to do business with consumers (B2C) or directly with businesses (B2B). HCL Commerce uses cloud friendly technology to make deployment and operation both easy and efficient. It provides easy-to-use tools for business users to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy. Business users can create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalog, and merchandising across all sales channels. Business users can also use AI enabled content management capabilities.
- Getting started
  HCL Commerce has different advantages for business users, administrators and developers. HCL Commerce targets each of these roles with a tailored set of offerings so that each of your users can get maximum benefit.
- Installing and deploying
  Learn how to install and deploy HCL Commerce development environments and HCL Commerce production environments.
  - HCL Commerce assemblies
    HCL Commerce consists of two offerings, HCL Commerce Professional, and HCL Commerce Enterprise. Each version of each edition of HCL Commerce is an offering. HCL Commerce Developer is a separate offering that is used by developers of the platform. It can be used to develop for the corresponding version of both HCL Commerce Professional and HCL Commerce Enterprise. Each offering is logically divided into subpackages called electronic assemblies, or eAssemblies. An eAssembly is a group of software that is devoted to a particular platform or environment. Each eAssembly contains the individual product images for that environment, called parts. Which parts you need depends on your usage and configuration choices.
  - Downloading software
    To set up an HCL Commerce production, development, or test environment, you require the associated product software images.
  - Supported software levels, fixes, and settings
    The following table provides a list of generally available (GA) software levels, fixes, and settings for the latest HCL Commerce Version 9.0 release.
  - Setting up HCL Commerce environments
    Learn how to set up development, testing, and production environments, and how to update the production environment through deploying custom changes and applying maintenance.
  - Deploying custom changes
    With HCL Commerce Version 9.0, you can customize HCL Commerce Docker image with the source code, configurations, and the Docker container start-up logic. Learn how to build Docker images with your customized code and deploy the images (and other changes) to your Docker containers.
    - Packaging customized code for deployment
      The HCL Commerce Build tool (WCB tool) is the tool that you use to build your customizations into input packages. These packages can be used to build new container images and deploy to your runtime environments. If a CI/CD pipeline is implemented, you do not need to concern yourself with deployment.
      - Configuring and building packages
        The HCL Commerce Build tool is highly configurable, to suit your current server environment, repository structure, and target environments.
      - Build tool prerequisites
        Before you begin, you must ensure that all prerequisites for the HCL Commerce Build tool are met. In addition, you must learn about the current build, development, and deployment processes that are used in your project. Learning about the current processes helps in planning the adoption of the HCL Commerce Build tool.
      - Build tool file location and structure
        In the HCL Commerce development environment, the HCL Commerce Build tool (WCB tool) is found in the WCDE_installdir/wcbd/ directory. In the HCL Commerce runtime environment, the HCL Commerce Build tool is found in the Utility server Docker container at /opt/WebSphere/CommerceServer90/wcbd.
      - Build tool repository structure
        The HCL Commerce Build tool is configured by default to use a specific reference repository structure. Use this repository structure because the default repository structure reduces configuration effort of the build process, and provides an intuitive structure that mirrors the HCL Commerce Developer workspace. If you are unable to use the default repository structure, the build process can be configured to adapt to your own repository structure.
      - Setting up source extraction Ant script
        The HCL Commerce Build tool requires you to provide a custom source extraction Ant build file. This file is run as part of the build process.
      - Custom package repository structure
        The HCL Commerce Build tool (WCB tool) can build applications for all four server types: the Transaction server, Store server, Search server, and Customization server. An example shows how you can build your own extensions using the HCL Commerce Build tool.
      - Building packages
        Use the HCL Commerce Build tool to build packages for deployment.
    - Building a custom Docker image from a deployable package
      You can build custom Docker images that include your custom code or custom configurations, and then share and deploy the new images.
    - Deploying custom database assets to an environment
      If you customize or change your HCL Commerce database, you must package and deploy the changed assets. Deploying your database assets can involve various schema changes and access control policies. In addition, if you have many changed assets, use the HCL Commerce loading utilities to load those changes.
  - Updating HCL Commerce overview
    Learn about HCL Commerce release types, and learn how to update your custom HCL Commerce site deployments.
- Migrating
  Before you migrate to HCL Commerce Version 9, review this information to help plan and execute your migration.
- Operating
  Topics in the Operating category highlight tasks that are typically performed by business users, customer support representatives, to complete their day-to-day tasks in the operation of the HCL Commerce site.
- Integrating
  Topics in the Integrating category highlight the tasks that are commonly performed for using HCL Commerce in combination with other products.
- Administering
  Topics in the Administering category highlight tasks that are typically performed by the Site Administrator, to support daily operations of the HCL Commerce site.
- Customizing
  The topics in the Customizing section describe tasks performed by an application developer to customize HCL Commerce.
- Tutorials
  HCL Commerce provides many tutorials to help you customize and understand your HCL Commerce instance and stores.
- Samples
  Topics in the Samples category highlight the various samples that are provided with HCL Commerce.
- Compliance
  The following section describes how you can leverage HCL Commerce features and functionality to help your site be compliant with different privacy and security standards.
- Securing
  These topics describe the security features of HCL Commerce and how to configure these features.
- Performance
  Topics in the Performance section describe the means by which to plan, implement, test, and re-visit the optimization of HCL Commerce site performance.
- Troubleshooting
  Topics in the Troubleshooting section highlight common issues that are encountered with HCL Commerce, and how they can be addressed or mitigated.
- Reference
  Topics in the Reference section contain all of the HCL Commerce reference documentation.

Packaging customized code for deployment

The HCL Commerce Build tool (WCB tool) is the tool that you use to build your customizations into input packages. These packages can be used to build new container images and deploy to your runtime environments. If a CI/CD pipeline is implemented, you do not need to concern yourself with deployment.

Introduction

The HCL Commerce Build tool an build customization assets for the four server environments that are found in HCL Commerce Version 9.0:

Note:

To customize the Web server, see Customizing the Web server Docker container.
To customize the Tooling single-page application (SPA), see ../../install/tasks/tiginstall_updatedocker_tooling.html.

Templates and samples of configuration and property files are provided for each type of application. You can easily start building these out-of-box applications, but more advanced and specialized build processes are also achievable by customizing the build ANT scripts themselves.

Each application is built into an isolated package. The configuration, input, and output files are separate for each application. While it is building one application, the tool cannot access or reference the assets of another application. However, only one HCL Commerce Build tool environment is needed to build all the applications. You can cleanly separate the files and assets of different applications by keeping them in different directories, or by using different file name conventions.

The HCL Commerce Build tool has the following features:

The build process works with source configuration management (SCM) systems, including CVS, Subversion, and Rational ClearCase. It can be extended to support other SCM systems.
HCL Commerce Build tool provides logging and mail notifications, which help with problem determination.
You can customize the application by using Apache Ant scripts. The default scripts are modular, and can be reused to save time when you are customizing your build process.
You can also use the HCL Commerce Build tool to build data and schema changes.

HCL Commerce Version 9.0.0.1 You can run the HCL Commerce Build tool from within the HCL Commerce development environment, or the HCL Commerce Utility server Docker container.