Recently I was given the task of installing xGenerator for a #Sitecore site. I haven’t used this tool before so I started doing some research on it. It is a great testing for creating realistic traffic for your Sitecore site. I found that you can download the code in GitHub. I didn’t find an installation package, but the code contains a package definition that you can use to create a package with Sitecore Rocks.

I got the code from here:

https://github.com/Sitecore/xGenerator

I followed the instructions here https://github.com/Sitecore/xGenerator/blob/master/src/Build%20instructions.txt. After following the steps and publishing I noticed I was getting a lot of version errors on my local Sitecore test site. The mistake I made was that my site was version 8.1, but the code was for version 8.2. So I had to go back and get a version pre 8.2. I went to the releases page. https://github.com/Sitecore/xGenerator/releases. I ended up downloading the nightly commit. For some reason the download that came after that was still 8.2. Maybe I overlooked something. In any case the nightly commit worked.

So after redoing the steps in the build instructions I was able to publish to my Sitecore site and get it to work. Building the package was easy.

I already have Sitecore Rocks installed so I double clicked on the package.

Sitecore Rocks brings up a connection window. You just need to connect to the instance of where you installed the xGenerator updates with Unicorn.

Now you can easily generate and download a package.

Just for my own piece of mind I created a new 8.1 site and installed the package. Just to make sure it worked. It did and I was off and running. I want to play around with this tool more and get familiar with it. Stay tuned for another blog on xGenerator in the future.