How to Setup Liferay Development environment

Just download and un-zip the tomcat bundle from above link into your local machine’s drive (ex. c:/project). After un-zip the folder name will be something like liferay-portal-6.0-XX-sp2. (This is sample format. XX will be either ce or ee).

The folder structure of bundle will be as blow.

data Folder :-
Liferay-Tomcat bundle comes with embedded HSQL database. data folder shown in screenshot contains the data file of HSQL database along with other data like document library’s folder to store document, lucene index folder etc.

deploy Folder:-
This folder is the place where we can put pluggin’s WAR files and liferay will automatically start deploying on server.

logs Folder:-
Contains log information.

tomcat-6.0.32 (Version may be very) Folder:-
This is actual tomcat server folder.

portal-ext.properties file:-
This is properties file which provide facility to define our own custom properties. This properties can be accessible to all plugins (including portlets, theme,hook,ext and theme).
We also can override properties that is provided by liferay out of the box. (the properties file provided by liferay is portal.properties while this properties file is portal-ext.properties means this is the extension of what liferay is providing. If we don’t mentioned any properties in portal-ext file then all properties defined in portal.properties will be available. We only have to define the properties which we want to override). We also can define our own custom properties in portal-ext file.

Liferay Plugin SDK Setup

First download plugin SDK from following url

http://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases

Select PluginSDK and click download button from community section (select Plugin-SDK at the last in drop down). This is part of liferay development environment setup.

Next you need to create folder like liferay-plugins-sdk-6.0.6 and unzip the plugin sdk zip file.
We need to create one property file with specific name. The format of name will be as below
build.<<windows-logged-in-user>>.properties

E.g. if user name is nilang.patel then property file name will be build.nilang.patel.properties.
(to get logged in user name type echo %username% in command prompt).
paste the following properties in this property file


app.server.type = tomcat
app.server.dir = D:\Project\Project1\liferay-portal-6.0.6\tomcat-6.0.32
app.server.deploy.dir = D:\Project\Project1\liferay-portal-6.0.6\tomcat-6.0.32\webapps
app.server.lib.global.dir = D:\Project\Project1\liferay-portal-6.0.6\tomcat-6.0.32\lib\ext
app.server.portal.dir = D:\Project\Project1\liferay-portal-6.0.6\tomcat-6.0.32\webapps\ROOT

This file pointing the path of liferay server. Liferay plugins (like portlets, hooks, theme, etc) referring classes present with liferay tomcat bundle. Therefore pointing out the server path with above properties will help to compile these plugins with these API dependencies.

When we build any plugin WAR from Plugin-SDK, it will place WAR file inside deploy folder of server. The whole process will be as below.

Plugins like Portlets,themes,layouts hooks etc. developed with plugin SDK may only import classes from portal-service.jar and other jar in lib folder of that plugin but will not allow to access classes from portal-impl.jar file which contains implementation of core features as shown in below diagram.

portal-service.jar file is available at tomcat/lib/ext folder while portal-impl.jar is available at tomcat/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib folder

Finally it is done. Now you can start Liferay development.