As mentioned in my series on migrating from DTM to Launch, DTM had a few deployment options:
- An Adobe/Akamai-hosted library (ie, your embed code starts with “//assets.adobedtm.com”)
- An FTP self-hosted library (DTM would push changes through FTP to a location on your own servers)
- A downloaded self-hosting option (you would manually download after changes and put onto your servers).
Technically, all three of these options also exist in Launch, though the approach is slightly different. Since I ended up having to get some clarification from Adobe on how to use Launch to copy these methods, I figured I’d document my findings here . When creating an adapter, you have the option of Managed by Adobe or SFTP:
If you select SFTP, it’s slightly different from in DTM, but the effect is the same.
How To Use the “Download” Method
If you want to go the download route, you still can, but it’s a bit hidden, so I’ll walk through it. Choose “Managed by Adobe” here, but then when setting up the corresponding environment, choose “Create Archive” and specify where the file will live on your servers (this is important because each file within the library package needs to know how to reference other files within the library package):
(You can even encrypt the file if you’d like extra security, so that a password would be required to open/view the archive).
Then, once you’ve built the library (and you MUST build it AFTER you’ve set it to “create archive”, or there won’t be anything to download), when viewing your environments click on the “install” icon:
This should give you a popup where you have the ability to “Download Latest Archive”:
This should download a .zip to your browser, the contents of which you can now put on your server. Be aware that the folder(s) within this zip may change names between builds (like the “BL1f0491fb5eb14ad3b60996dd31aedaa6” folder in my image below, in a previous build had been “BL92309a949e564f269ce6719b1136910f”), so if you are trying to merely paste one build over another, you may want to clean out the old subfolders afterwards to keep the overall folder clean.
Hopefully this helps fill some of the documentation gaps out there. Please let me know if you have any additional insight or questions!
When you self-host Launch – is there any way to auto-update the library rather than manually downloading the zip file and updating the line of code for the change every time a change is made and a new library is produced? I’m just trying to figure out how I can test things and work around development when testing since it’s a pretty big change in our current workflow.
Hey Kalen,
First, you can set it up to push through SFTP (https://docs.adobelaunch.com/launch-reference/publishing/adapters#sftp), but the interface handles that very differently. And, I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen anyone use it yet because of the hoops you have to go through to get the SFTP set up (for legal/security reasons).
Second, you shouldn’t have to be updating the line of code each time. The link to that environment should stay the same, it’s only the subfolders that change. TBH, you can rename the file- the main file (the one in yellow here) can be named whatever you want, so long as the subfolders are all the same. Hope that helps!