

The Publish instance is the AEM environment that visitors to your website interact with. It is also critical test code against a local Publish instance. AEM Sites is a WYSIWYG authoring CMS and therefore most of the CSS and JavaScript can be tested against an authoring instance. This allows you to create pages and add and configure components. When developing most of the time, you are deploying code to an Author instance. The Author runmode is the environment that digital marketers use to create and manage content. If you are new to AEM, there are two basic run modes can be installed: Author and Publish.

All AEM development should start by writing and running code against a local AEM instance. When we refer to a local AEM instance, we are talking about a copy of Adobe Experience Manager that is running on a developer’s personal machine.
