Last updated on 30th September, 2017 by George Taylor

The main purpose of the publisher is to serve content to the end user. The publisher is generally not visible to any user other than the operations staff for maintenance. For this reason all content the end user sees is proxied through a dispatcher.

Content is delivered to the publisher from author as part of it's replication services, this includes replication from the publisher back to the author via the reverse replication service which pulls content from the publishers outbox.

Because the server is generally hidden from the internet only a system administrator can make changes to the configuration of the publisher. Because of this any changes that have to be made manually should be kept to a minimum.

Setting up a publisher is as simple as telling it what port and run mode to start with. This is done from the AEM jar file. Renaming the AEM jar as aem-publish-4503.jar and running it with the command java jar-aem-publish-4503.jar will create a new publisher in the crx-quickstart folder.

You will need a valid AEM licence file in the same folder for AEM to work.

The name of the jar file is what determines the default runmode (author/publish) and the port to start the server on. The default structure for the jar name is <name>-<default run mode>-<port>.jar. While this is the standard to be able to create a new server with the command java -jar aem-author-4502.jar you can also pass the parameters to determine this information as discussed on the custom standalone install page

Once created the default run mode can't be changed as it is backed into the extracted system folders. Runmodes are discussed more in the AEM Concepts page.