Boost your career and salary! Get into SAP Commerce

One thing I’ve learned and experienced throughout the years is that getting well paid is not a matter of luck. It’s not just a matter of skills… the type of skills really make a difference.

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Currently, there’s a huge demand for consultants and developers who are skilled in SAP Commerce. In other words: If you bring these skills, you outrun the “typical salaries”.

I went through the valley of pain learning this product/solution from zero and want to smooth your learning experience with a series of hints, recommendations and tweaks.

Getting started

The first obstacle you need to master is getting a so called S-User from SAP with download permissions. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any publicly available download. Got your user and the required permissions? Then proceed to “SAP Software Downloads” on their launchpad. Just look for “SAP Commerce download”. The packages on SAP are called CXCOMM<version>….ZIP

If you are run Windows on your workstation, be prepared for some difficulties. This is also a good opportunity to switch to Linux :D Debian or Ubuntu work well. Still with Windows?

I’ve seen the “long paths issue” on Windows machines many times. Be sure to extract the CXCOMM… archive as close to the root as possible. E.g. C:\cxcomm\

SAP Commerce (previously known as Hybris) also needs a database to store it’s data. The default settings will use an embedded database. However, I always recommend to setup a local MySQL database so that one can inspect changes also on DB-level. At a later stage, pretty useful!

I badly failed using MySQL v8 recently. Stick to MySQL v5.7 to save many tears for now :) And another “got-ya”: Database drivers are not included. Be sure to download a jdbc driver for your db and system environment and copy over to hybris/bin/platform/lib/dbdriver

Now it’s time to run the installer… just navigate to the installer directory and execute the following from a terminal/commandline

./install.sh -r cx -A local_property:initialpassword.admin=your_password

This will create required configuration files with default settings and get other things in place. Once completed, head over to hybris/bin/config and open the local.properties file with a text editor to make SAP commerce use your mysql database (I assume you created one called “hybriscommerce” on your own). Paste the following anywhere in the file:

####### MYSQL configuration for hybris ############# db.url=jdbc\:mysql\://localhost/hybriscommerce?useConfigs\=maxPerformance&characterEncoding\=utf8&useSSL\=false 
db.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
db.username=root
db.password=<yourpass>
db.tableprefix=
db.customsessionsql=SET SESSION TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED;
mysql.optional.tabledefs=CHARSET\=utf8 COLLATE\=utf8_bin mysql.tabletype=InnoDB mysql.allow.fractional.seconds=true

Now you’re good to proceed to hybris/bin/platform where the following commands will launch the server:

. ./setantenv.sh
ant clean
ant all
./hybrisserver.sh debug

The console will print something like Startup in 123456789ms which means that by then, the application is running. Urls which are working without any further configuration are https://localhost:9002/hac and https://localhost:9002/backoffice

HAC is the administration console where you can login with the user admin and the password your_password.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!