Installing Sitecore 9.3 with the Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA)

Sitecore just announced at Sitecore Symposium 2019 in Orlando, that version 9.3 of their Digital Experience Platform has been released.

There are several ways of installing Sitecore 9.3, through the Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF scripts), Azure ARM templates and for local development there’s also the Sitecore Install Assistant (SIA). In this blogpost we’re going to have a look on how to install Sitecore 9.3 with SIA.

Once 9.3 is available, download the Sitecore Install Assistant from https://dev.sitecore.net/.

Once you have it on your hard drive, open up the setup.exe in administrator mode, and review the information on the Welcome page.

Click Start! As you can see SIA allows you to install Sitecore 9.3 pre-requisites very easily.

If you haven’t already done so, go ahead and install the pre-requisites. Skip this step if you’ve already installed them before.

With Sitecore 9.3 SIA is now able to install Solr 8.1.1. for you. Click Install if you want to install it, if you’ve got it already running click Skip. This is one of the great additions in SIA compared to 9.2

Now we can configure the Sitecore Settings. Locate the Sitecore license file, give the instance a prefix and set the password to ‘b’ (of course don’t do this in production, but with ‘b’ you just made your life so much easier ;-))

Configure the SQL Server name, with the user credentials that is configured as an admin in SQL Server. SIA will make sure that database are created through this admin user.

Now configure the Solr settings you either installed in step 3, or already had installed.

A new step in SIA for Sitecore 9.3 is the option to install Sitecore Modules. Currently only SXA is available, hopefully more modules will follow in the future. Click Next.