Umbraco 9 on Cloud

Update: Umbraco 9 is out and available on Umbraco Cloud.

Join Warren, Developer Advocate at Umbraco HQ, as he dives into some of the new features available with Umbraco 9 on Cloud.

Umbraco Cloud is the official development and hosting platform for Umbraco projects. Making your life easier with one-click install, out-of-the-box deployment pipeline, and content synchronization. And in a bit (tomorrow actually!), this will include Umbraco 9 which comes with a wide range of improvements and opens up for some really cool things in the future.

When will Umbraco 9 be available on Cloud?

From tomorrow, September 28th, Umbraco 9 will be the default version on Umbraco Cloud. This means creating a new project, or taking a trial, will create an Umbraco 9 installation for you. You will still be able to create projects based on Umbraco 8 but this is now opt-in.

Umbraco 9 is Umbraco CMS running on .NET 5 (ASP.NET Core). This is a big milestone for Umbraco, as we will be one of the first .NET based CMS’ to fully support the new framework and ensure a development and hosting experience that is based on up-to-date tech and can keep up with all the new improvements and fixes that are released by Microsoft.

So, what does this mean for your Umbraco Cloud projects? Well, there are some new conventions to get used to when developing with Umbraco but overall, you will find that Umbraco is still very much Umbraco. It is just running on new and improved technology. The editing experience is still as friendly as it has ever been. Warren Buckley, developer advocate at Umbraco HQ, has put together a top 5 of changes you should be aware of as a developer going from Umbraco 8 to 9. 

A new framework, a new structure

Umbraco 9 projects on Umbraco Cloud will have all the features you know and love, in fact, you won’t see much of a difference in the Umbraco Cloud portal at all, except for the major version number being 9 instead of 8. You can still work with multiple environments, synchronize content and schema, benefit from automatic upgrades and all the other Cloud features you’re used to.

Where you WILL notice a change is when you clone a project down to your local machine. The project and file structure has changed quite a bit - And it’s for the better! Some of these changes are made as a consequence of switching to the new framework, some of them are improvements we’ve wanted to make for a long time and now, with a new infrastructure and .NET 5 as the underlying framework, these improvements are possible.

A proper project

First of all, you’ll notice that your initial clone is a lot quicker. An Umbraco Cloud project is no longer a “website” but a proper .NET project. This means we can rely on NuGet packages, which will be fetched on the first build. You can still run it just as easily as before. You actually have more options; by being a .NET 5 project you have access to command-line tools to manage, build and run your projects. Using the dotnet run command in your project library will initiate a build and spin up a local server for your project.

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That’s all you need to do! Now Umbraco is running on your local machine and is ready for testing. You can of course also still use IIS Express to spin up your project. Included in the repository is a readme.md with instructions for how to get started and details on some of the new options available (like running it natively on a Mac!).

Working with Visual Studio solutions

If you are used to working in Visual Studio, with a .NET solution, this has also gotten a lot easier. Converting to a solution is done with two simple commands. First, you add a solution to the root folder:

dotnet new sln

You will now have a solution file and can open this up in Visual Studio. You’ll need to add the Umbraco project to the solution. This can be done from Visual Studio (right-click in solution explorer and add existing project) or add the UmbracoProject via command line:

dotnet sln add .\src\UmbracoProject\UmbracoProject.csproj

From here, you can work with it like any other .NET solution, adding class libraries, install packages, and so forth. If you’re running in a non-Windows environment you’ll need to set up an SQL database to use with the local clone, see the readme.md file in your project for more details.

Easier to collaborate

The best thing is, when you want to push your changes to the development environment, all you have to do is commit and push the changes via GIT, including the solution file, and this will initiate a build process on the server. 

Simple and transparent

When one of your colleagues clones the project down, they will now get the solution file and can open it up in Visual Studio and start working with it immediately. You no longer need to maintain multiple repositories for a project containing VS solutions and custom code. It’s all in the Cloud repository, simple and transparent.

As mentioned earlier, In the project root, you’ll find a readme.md file with documentation on all the commands and options you have for getting a project up and running locally.

All the benefits, none of the hassle

We hope you like the new way projects are structured on Umbraco Cloud. Our aim is to make it easier and simpler to work with both as a single dev and in teams. You’ll also find that Umbraco 9 is more performant than Umbraco 8. This is, of course, also the case on Umbraco Cloud - See the Umbraco performance tuning talk from this year’s Codegarden for more details on the performance gains. 

Umbraco 9 will be released tomorrow, September 28th, 2021, and you can start creating Umbraco Cloud projects based on Umbraco 9 as soon as it is out. So why not join us for the launch celebration at 14.30 CEST, where you can get the full story on the new major release of Umbraco: 

Umbraco 9 is now available