Managing Your Liferay Server with Blade CLI

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to manage a Liferay server using Blade CLI. For example, Blade CLI lets you install, start, stop, inspect, and modify a Liferay server.

Make sure you’re in a Liferay Workspace and have a bundle installed and configured in the workspace before testing the Blade CLI commands on your own. To learn more about installing a Liferay server in a Liferay Workspace, see the Creating a Liferay Workspace with Liferay Dev Studio DXP section. The following Blade CLI commands are covered in this sub-section:

• server
• sh

The first thing that comes to mind when interacting with a server is simply turning it on/off. You can use the server sub-command to accomplish this. To turn on a Liferay server (Tomcat or Wildfly/JBoss), you can run

blade server start

This starts the server in the background. You can tail the logs by adding the -t flag. If you prefer starting the server in the foreground, run blade server run. Additionally, if you prefer starting the server in debug mode, add the -d flag.

Debug mode can be customized by adding the -p tag to set the custom remote debugging port (defaults are 8000 for Tomcat and 8787 for Wildfly) and/or the boolean -s tag to set whether you want to suspend the started server until the debugger is connected.

Once you’ve started your server, you can examine its OSGi container by using the sh command, which provides access to your server using the Felix Gogo shell. For example, to check if you successfully deployed your application from the previous section, you could run:

blade sh lb

Your output lists a long list of modules that are active/installed in your server’s OSGi container.

Figure 1: Blade CLI accesses the Gogo shell script to run the `lb` command.

You can run any Gogo command using blade sh. This command requires Developer Mode to be enabled. Developer Mode is enabled in Liferay Workspace by default. See the Using the Felix Gogo Shell section for more information on this tool.

To turn off your server, run

blade server stop

Awesome! You learned how to conveniently interact with Liferay DXP using Blade CLI.