Is there a tool or system to migrate JCR component level changes?

Question

let's say you develop a component to display some images based on a category field.  This gets deployed to your 5 cloud environments (dev, test, UAT, stage, prod etc).
 
On production and UAT the Content Authors add this component to various pages, and set the category values.
 
You now develop a new version of this component which you remove the category field, and add new fields such as categoryList.
 
When this new version of the component get deployed to each cloud environment, all pages which use this component get broken, as they expect a categoryList field.
 
We would want to run a script to add the new field to all existing instances of the component, and set its value to an array with the value of the old category field as the only element.  This would only run once, if not already run for that env.
 
This is very similar to migrating a SQL database change.  For this you would use a tool such as liquibase, which has  change scripts which get run when the system boots, if that script wasnt previously applied.  Liquibase happens to use scripts which contain SQL statements (for simple table structure or data changes), but could also contain code (for more complex changes).
 
This must be a pretty common problem for AEM?

lukasz-m · Accepted Answer

Hi @tb3dock,I would recommend to use AEM Easy Content Upgrade tool https://github.com/valtech/aem-easy-content-upgradeThis is tool that will allow you to run groovy script automatically, as part of package installation.Here are also other pros:it is compatible with AEM as a Cloud Serviceit includes groovy console and all dependencies needed to run itit allows to run groovy script automatically, and make sure it will not be run againit provides GUI that will allow you to check the results of any groovy script executed via AECU and trigger it manually once again if neededAlternatively you can use Groovy Console as a stand alone tool:https://github.com/icfnext/aem-groovy-consoleBut in that case you will need to run your scripts manually on each instance and each environment.

Himanshu_Singhal · Answer

@tb3dock As @lukasz-m mentioned AECU tool is the fit for your requirement. Whatever pros already mentioned, on the top of it, script written with AECU are indeed compact and saves a lot of boilerplate code.
If not AECU then standard Groovy script is the way.

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