Installing Sitecore Horizon

Sitecore Horizon is a powerful Next-Gen Experience Management Tool which your Content Authors and Marketers are going to love. It changes the way we look at CMS. Built with Node it’s way faster.

Sitecore Horizon brings 3 key features on the table:

Enhanced Page Editor (with features like Auto-Save, Quick Publish)

Simulator Mode (Device Channel and Date-based History)

Insights View (Page Analytics)

IMPORTANT: Installing Horizon requires Sitecore 9.3 or above.

Pre-requisites:

1. Sitecore 9.3 instance (configurations with CM role)
   Using either SIF or SIA for installing Sitecore 9.3 works fine. I tried both options to spin up my XP0 instance and Horizon worked well with both. 
2. CM under HTTPS protocol with valid certificates
3. Valid Sitecore license.xml file
4. Turn on WebSocket Protocol feature (Windows Features):
   
   You can read more about this here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8/iis-80-websocket-protocol-support
   Note: Missing this step could result in socket related client-side errors and unexpected behavior when running Horizon, although the Installation could still get through.   
5. Sitecore Identity Server (recommended to be on the same domain/sub-domain as the CM instance, to avoid the chrome warning on Samesite cookie error)
6. Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF) 2.2.0
7. ASP.NET Core/.NET Core: Runtime & Hosting Bundle 2.1
8. Node 10 and npm 6
9. Restart your machine (if required)

Installation:

1. Download the latest Sitecore Horizon Package from here (9.3.0 Initial Release at the time of writing): https://dev.sitecore.net/Downloads/Sitecore_Horizon/
2. Extract the ZIP package:
   
3. Open parameters.ps1 and edit input parameters highlighted below:
   
4. Open Windows PowerShell as Administrator and Run Install.ps1
   
   
   
5. Once complete, you can login to the CM instance and observe the “Horizon” App under Content Editing Tools on your LaunchPad as shown below:
   
6. You should also see the new AuthoringHostClient IIS Web App as shown below:
   

In case you update the Identity Server, ensure that the ClientSecret1 of the Horizon Web App ({Identity Server WebRoot}/Config/Production/ Sitecore.IdentityServer.Host.xml) matches the Identity Server ClientSecret1 ({AuthoringHostClient WebRoot}/Config/OpenIdConnect.xml).

Uninstall:

It takes only a few seconds to remove Horizon from your CM instance. You can run the uninstall.ps1 in the Install Package with the parameters.ps1 configured properly. It basically removes the AuthoringHostClient AppPool, Website and related configurations.

However, the Uninstall did not completely remove Horizon from LaunchPad:

But you can explicitly remove it from the Core DB (/sitecore/content/Applications/Launchpad/PageSettings/Buttons/ContentEditing)

or run the following command line in your SPE:
Get-Item -Path “core:/sitecore/client/Applications/Launchpad/PageSettings/Buttons/ContentEditing/Horizon” | Remove-Item

That’s it. Uninstall is quite simple.

Overall my installation went quite smoothly given the fact that I had my fair share of troubleshooting while installing Sitecore 9.3 XP0 (SIA option).

Hope this helps!