Installing Xperience

The following procedure describes how to install Kentico Xperience. The installation creates two separate projects – an MVC 5 or ASP.NET Core project for the live site, and an Xperience project that provides the content editing and administration interface.

1. Click Next on the welcome screen of the installer.

2. Select your country. The installer automatically tries to pre-select the appropriate country based on your system’s locale.

3. Accept the license terms.

4. Click Next.

5. Click Custom installation.
   

6. Check if the installation location for the program files suits you (these are only the setup files, not the web project).

   • Click the file system path if you wish to specify a custom location for the program files.
   • When should I install only program files?

   

7. Click Next.

8. Select a development model (ASP.NET Core or ASP.NET MVC 5) and click Next.

9. Specify the target location for the new web projects.

   Installing new sites into existing Xperience instances

   If you wish to add a new site into an existing Xperience administration project, set the target location to the given project’s installation folder.

   In this scenario, the installer adds the live site project into the specified folder and uses the administration project’s existing database. A new Xperience administration project is not created.

   Installation into existing instances is NOT supported for the Dancing Goat sample site with the ASP.NET Core development model.

   

10. Configure the installation type options:

    • Register to IIS – if enabled, the installer registers the new web projects as applications in the local Internet Information Services server.

      • When to register installed projects into IIS?
      • If you do not have IIS installed, the utility automatically installs the simplified version, IIS Express.
      • If you disable registration to IIS in the installer, you need to create and configure the IIS applications manually after the installation (for both live site and Xperience administration projects). Also, you need to set the Presentation URL of your site in the Xperience Sites application to the URL where your live site is running (see Setting domain names for sites).
      • The installer does not support automatic registration into IIS for ASP.NET Core live site projects, only for the Xperience administration application. To learn more about registering Core projects under IIS together with the administration application, see Host ASP.NET Core on Windows with IIS.

    • Site

      • New site – installs a blank project suitable for the development of a new site. Enter a Name, which affects all things related to the new project, such as the project folder on the file system, the project and assembly name in Visual Studio, the virtual directory and application name in IIS, and the name of the corresponding site in Xperience.

        Do not set the site’s name to “global”. This is a reserved system keyword and could lead to various issues and inconsistencies.

      • Dancing Goat sample site – installs a sample project and site. Suitable for evaluation purposes or as inspiration for your own development.

        License limitations for the sample site

        The Dancing Goat sample site uses features that are only available in the Kentico Xperience Enterprise license edition. If you use the lower Kentico Xperience Business license edition, you may encounter problems. The initial trial license is equivalent to an Enterprise license.

11. Click Next.

12. Select the I have access to SQL server option.

    • What if I do not install the database with my web project?
    If you are installing a new site into an existing Xperience instance, the installer automatically uses the given instance’s database. In this scenario, all information on the Database tab is read-only, and you can directly start the installation by clicking Install (skip the remaining steps on this page).

13. Specify the name of your SQL server and choose an authentication option.

    If you choose the Integrated Windows authentication option, make sure that your Windows account exists as a user in the SQL server database, and has full permissions and the correct schema configured (the recommended database schema is dbo).

14. Click Establish connection.

15. Type the name of a new database for your web project.
    

16. Click Next.

17. Choose which additional components you wish to install for the Xperience administration project (not available when installing a site into an existing Xperience instance).

    • What is the Windows service for Scheduler?

18. Click Next.

19. Decide whether to enable the Kentico improvement program for the installed instance (via the Send anonymous usage records to Kentico checkbox).
    

20. Click Install.

After the installation is successfully finished, the administration interface opens in the default browser. If you have installed the Dancing Goat sample site, the live site also opens in another tab. For new sites, the installation creates a blank project and an empty site, so you need to develop the code and add content before the live site becomes available.