Maven Workspace

A Liferay Maven Workspace is a generated environment that is built to hold and manage Liferay projects built with Maven. This workspace aids in Liferay project management by applying various Maven plugins and configured properties. The Liferay Maven Workspace offers a full development lifecycle for your Maven projects to make developing them for Liferay DXP easier than ever. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to leverage the development lifecycle of a Liferay Maven Workspace.

First, you’ll learn how to install a Maven Workspace.

Installation

The Maven Workspace is installed by generating the workspace project from either an archetype or via Blade CLI. You can generate a workspace via archetype by executing the following command:

mvn archetype:generate \
    -DarchetypeGroupId=com.liferay \
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=com.liferay.project.templates.workspace \
    -DgroupId=[GROUP_ID] \
    -DartifactId=[WORKSPACE_NAME] \
    -Dversion=[VERSION]

If you have Blade CLI installed, and want to use that instead of generating an archetype, you can run the following command:

blade init -b maven [WORKSPACE_NAME]

A Maven Workspace is generated in the current folder. No other tools or CLIs are required for Maven Workspace.

Anatomy

The default Maven Workspace contains the following folders/files:

• [MAVEN_WORKSPACE]
  • configs
    • common
    • dev
    • local
    • prod
    • uat
  • modules
    • pom.xml
  • themes
    • pom.xml
  • wars
    • pom.xml
  • pom.xml

For more information on the configs folder, see the Testing Modules section. The modules, themes, and wars folders hold projects of that type. The parent pom.xml configures your workspace as a Maven project and applies the Bundle Support plugin, which is required for your Maven Workspace to handle Liferay DXP 7.1 projects. You can also configure workspace properties in your POM, which you’ll learn about later.

Next, you’ll learn how to initialize and package Liferay DXP bundles using workspace.

Adding a Liferay Bundle to a Maven Workspace

Liferay Maven Workspaces can generate and hold a Liferay Server. This lets you build/test your plugins against a running Liferay instance. Before generating a Liferay instance, open the pom.xml file located in your workspace’s root folder and set the version of the Liferay bundle to generate and install by setting the download URL for the liferay.workspace.bundle.url property. For example,

<properties>
    <liferay.workspace.bundle.url>
        https://releases-cdn.liferay.com/portal/7.1.0-ga1/liferay-ce-portal-tomcat-7.1.0-ga1-20180703012531655.zip
    </liferay.workspace.bundle.url>
    ...
</properties>

You can also set location of your Liferay bundle with the liferay.workspace.home.dir property. It’s set to bundles by default.

Important: Make sure the com.liferay.portal.tools.bundle.support plugin in your POM is configured to use version 3.2.0+. The liferay.workspace.bundle.url property does not work for workspaces using an older version of the Bundle Support plugin. See the Updating a Maven Workspace section for instructions on how to update the plugin.

Once you’ve finalized your workspace properties, navigate to your workspace’s root folder and run

blade server init

This uses workspace’s pre-bundled Blade CLI tool to download the version of Liferay DXP you specified in your POM file and installs your Liferay DXP instance in the bundles folder. If you prefer to not use Blade CLI or do not have it installed, the pure Maven equivalent for this command is mvn bundle-support:init.

If you want to skip the downloading process, you can create the bundles folder manually in your workspace’s ROOT folder and extract your Liferay Portal bundle to that folder.

You can also produce a distributable Liferay DXP bundle (Zip) from within a workspace. To do this, navigate to your workspace’s root folder and run the following command:

mvn bundle-support:dist

Your distribution file is available from the workspace’s /target folder.

Configuring Maven Workspace Properties

There are some configurable workspace properties you can set in the root pom.xml file:

• liferay.workspace.bundle.url: the URL used to download the Liferay DXP bundle. For more information, see Adding a Liferay Bundle to a Maven Workspace.
• liferay.workspace.environment: the name of a configs subfolder holding the Liferay DXP server configuration to use. See Testing Modules for more information.

Properties can be set by adding tags with the property name. See the property configurations below for an example on how these can be set in your POM:

<properties>
    <liferay.workspace.bundle.url>https://releases-cdn.liferay.com/portal/7.1.0-ga1/liferay-ce-portal-tomcat-7.1.0-ga1-20180703012531655.zip</liferay.workspace.bundle.url>
    <liferay.workspace.environment>local</liferay.workspace.environment>
</properties>

Next, you’ll learn how to add and deploy modules/projects in your Maven Workspace.

Module Management

Maven Workspace makes managing your Maven project easier than ever. To create a project, navigate to the appropriate workspace folder for that type of project (e.g., modules, wars, etc.). Then generate the project archetype. You can view a full listing of the available archetypes in the Project Templates reference section. Once the project is generated, it can leverage all of Maven Workspace’s functionality.

Maven Workspace also lets you deploy your projects to Liferay DXP using Maven. See the Deploying a Project Built with Maven to Liferay DXP tutorial for more information.

Want to leverage Maven Workspace’s testing infrastructure so you can simulate your Maven projects in a specific environment? See the Testing Modules section for more information.

Once you have your Maven projects solidified and ready for the limelight, it’d be great to release your projects to the public. Maven Workspace doesn’t provide this functionality, but there are easy ways to use external release tools with workspace. See the Releasing Modules section for more information.

Next, you’ll learn how to update a Maven Workspace.

Updating a Maven Workspace

Liferay Workspace is updated periodically with new features, so you’ll want to update your workspace instance accordingly. To update your Maven Workspace, you must update the Bundle Support plugin configured in your workspace’s root pom.xml file:

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.liferay</groupId>
    <artifactId>com.liferay.portal.tools.bundle.support</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.5</version>
    ...
</plugin>

Update the version to the latest available release. You can reference the available releases for the Bundle Support plugin here.