Deploying in production

Often times you can’t use Ant to deploy web applications in production or pre-production environments. Additionally, some application servers such as WebSphere or Weblogic have their own deployment tools, and Liferay’s autodeploy process won’t work. Let’s look at two methods for deploying and redeploying Ext plugins in these scenarios.

Method 1: Redeploying Liferay’s web application

You can use this method in any application server that supports auto-deploy; Tomcat and Glassfish are two examples. What’s the benefit? The only artifact that needs to be transferred to the production system is your Ext plugin’s .war file, produced using the ant war target. This .war file is usually small and easy to transport. Execute these steps on the server:

1. Redeploy Liferay:

   If this is your first time deploying your Ext plugin to this server, skip this step. Otherwise, start by executing the same steps you first used to deploy Liferay on your app server. If you’re using a bundle, unzip it again. If you installed Liferay manually on an existing application server, you’ll need to redeploy the Liferay .war file and copy both the libraries required globally by Liferay and your Ext plugin to the appropriate directory within the application server.

2. Copy the Ext plugin .war into the auto-deploy directory. For a bundled Liferay distribution, the deploy folder is in Liferay’s root folder of your bundle (e.g., liferay-portal-6.1.2-ce-ga3/).

3. Once the Ext plugin is detected and deployed by Liferay, restart your Liferay server.

Method 2: Generate an aggregated WAR file

Some application servers don’t support auto-deploy; WebSphere and Weblogic are two examples. With an aggregated WAR file, all Ext plugins are merged before deployment to production. A single .war file will contain Liferay plus the changes from all your Ext plugins. Before you deploy the Liferay .war file, copy the dependency .jar files for Liferay and all Ext plugins to the global application server class loader in the production server. The precise location varies from server to server; see Using Liferay Portal 6.1 to get the details for your application server.

The first step in creating the aggregated .war file is to deploy your Ext plugin. The remaining steps can differ depending on your application server; let’s proceed by assuming you’re using a Liferay Tomcat bundle. Deploy your plugin, restart the server, then shut it down. The files are now aggregated in your app server. Create a .war file by zipping the webapps/ROOT folder of Tomcat, then copy all the libraries from the lib/ext directory of Tomcat to your application server’s global classpath–these files are associated with your Ext plugins.

Once your .war file is aggregated, perform these actions on your server:

1. Redeploy Liferay using the aggregated WAR file.

2. Stop the server and copy the new version of the global libraries to the appropriate directory in the application server.

Next we’ll show you how to migrate your extension environment (from older verisons of Liferay) into Ext plugins.