Creating Asset Live Copies Programmatically in AEM

In Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Live Copy functionality—backed by the Multi-Site Manager (MSM)—allows for synchronized content replication across regional or site-specific structures, while retaining the flexibility for localized changes.

For web pages, AEM provides public APIs that enable developers to programmatically create Live Copies using standard interfaces. However, no such public API exists for creating Live Copies of DAM assets. This lack of direct support creates challenges in automation scenarios involving the DAM.

To work around this, we leveraged AEM’s internal servlet mechanism to programmatically create Asset Live Copies, as explained below.

🛠️ Solution Overview

To programmatically create asset Live Copies:

• We simulate a POST request to the internal servlet /bin/wcmcommand
• Use a system service user via ResourceResolverFactory
• Leverage SlingRequestProcessor and SlingInternalRequest to build and execute the call internally within the AEM instance

🧪 Code Walkthrough

Here’s the implementation:

import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.sling.api.resource.LoginException;
import org.apache.sling.api.resource.ResourceResolver;
import org.apache.sling.engine.SlingRequestProcessor;
import org.apache.sling.servlethelpers.internalrequests.SlingInternalRequest;
import org.osgi.service.component.annotations.Component;
import org.osgi.service.component.annotations.Reference;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import com.techrevel.core.service.AssetLiveCopyService;

/**
 * Creates Live Copies for assets using a POST servlet call to the /bin/wcmcommand endpoint.
 *
 */
@Component(service = CreateAssetLiveCopy.class, immediate = true)
public class CreateAssetLiveCopyImpl implements AssetLiveCopyService {

    @Reference
    private SlingRequestProcessor slingRequestProcessor;

    private final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass());

    @Override
    public boolean createLiveCopy(String srcPath, String destPath, String title, String label) {
        Map<String, Object> param = new HashMap<>();
        param.put(ResourceResolverFactory.SUBSERVICE, SUBSERVICE_NAME);

        try (ResourceResolver resolver = resolverFactory.getServiceResourceResolver(param)) {

            // Build and execute internal POST request
            String response = new SlingInternalRequest(resourceResolver, slingRequestProcessor, "/bin/wcmcommand")
                    .withRequestMethod("POST")
                    .withParameter("cmd", "createLiveCopy")
                    .withParameter("srcPath", srcPath)
                    .withParameter("destPath", destPath)
                    .withParameter("title", title)
                    .withParameter("label", label)
                    .withParameter("cq:rolloutConfigs", "/libs/msm/wcm/rolloutconfigs/default")
                    .execute()
                    .checkStatus(200)
                    .getResponseAsString();

            logger.info("LiveCopy created successfully. Response: {}", response);
            return true;

        } catch (IllegalArgumentException | IOException | LoginException e) {
            logger.error("LiveCopy creation failed due to error: {}", e.getMessage());
        }

        return false;
    }
}

Explanation of Request Parameters

• cmd: Always set to "createLiveCopy"
• srcPath: Full path of the source asset
• destPath: Target path for the Folder
• title : Title for the Live Copy
• label: Asset name for the live copy
• cq:rolloutConfigs: Defines the rollout strategy

To know more about SlingInternalRequest, refer to SlingInternalRequest: A Cleaner Way to Reuse AEM Servlets with Internal API Access