How to Deploy Liferay

Liferay Portal is a popular enterprise Java-based web platform for building business solutions, equipped with the features, that are commonly required for the development of websites and portals. It includes a built-in web CMS with an assembly of themes, pages, portlets and gadgets available.

You can have a Liferay instance up and running within minutes using one-click install option.

The process is simple - just click Get it hosted now, type your email and install Liferay in a minute, skipping the steps of manual installation.

Find the full list of applications available for one-click installation at our Marketplace page.

In case you would like to configure and run your Liferay instance manually, just follow the step-by-step instruction below.

Create Environment

1. Login to the platform dashboard using your credentials.

2. Click New environment to set up an environment.

3. In the appeared Environment topology window, select Tomcat 7 as your application server at the Java tab and set the resources amount for it according to your needs, with the help of cloudlet sliders in the Vertical scaling section. Then type your environment name (for example, liferay) and click Create:

4. In a minute or so your environment will be created and appear in the environment’s list.

Configure Application Server

Before installing Liferay, you need to make some configurations at the created environment.

1. The latest version of the Liferay Community Edition package is available at the Liferay website’s download page. Navigate to it, choose the Bundle with Tomcat option from the corresponding drop-down list (inside the Community section) and select Download.

2. Extract files from the archive you’ve just downloaded into the preferred directory at your local computer.

3. Now you need to upload the downloaded Tomcat libraries, which will be required by the Liferay application. So switch back to the platform dashboard and select the Config button for your Tomcat 7 server.

4. In the opened Configuration Manager tab, find the lib directory and click on the Upload button next to it (it will appear while hovering over this directory). In the opened window select all the files inside the liferay-portal-6.x-ce-gax\tomcat-7.x.x\lib\ext folder of the previously extracted archive and select Open.

5. After the uploading is finished, navigate to the home folder and click the New file button (circled in the image below) at the top of the tools panel, to create a new portal-ext.properties configuration file.

Then insert just one code line inside the created file to complete the configuration of your server:

resource.repositories.root=${user.home}/liferay

Click Save.

Deploy Application

Now you need to upload and deploy the Liferay application package to your environment. As its size exceeds the limits for local files uploading (which stays at 150Mb), you’ll need to upload it through a URL. So, perform the following:

1. Return to the same page you’ve downloaded the archive with libraries at, scroll about halfway down the page to find the Additional Files section and select the button with a down-arrow next the box with the latest Liferay Portal WAR file.

2. You’ll be redirected to the SourceForge site and automatic downloading will start after a few seconds. Stop it as you don’t need a file itself, but just a link to it, which can be copied by right-clicking at the direct link line and choosing the Copy Link Address option (or the similar one according to your browser) from the appeared context menu.

3. Then switch to your dashboard once again and click on the Upload button at the Deployment Manager tab. In the opened Upload archive frame, select the URL tab at its top and paste the copied link to the Liferay .war package inside the same-named field. Click Upload.

4. Once the package is uploaded, deploy it to the environment you have created previously by clicking the Deploy button next to the package name. You’ll see the form shown below, therein you can set the desired context name (or leave it blank to use the default ROOT one). Click the Deploy button to proceed.

5. Now Open your application in browser.

6. Finally, after the page is successfully loaded, you can create your account, confirm the configuration and start using all the provided capabilities of this application!

And here is a video version of the same procedure:

What’s next?

• Tutorials by Category
• Java Tutorials
• Setting Up Environment