Installing Apps Manually

By default, apps you download from the Control Panel via Liferay Marketplace install automatically. But what if the app you want to install isn’t on Marketplace? What if all you have is the app’s file? In this case, you must install the app manually. This article shows you how to do this. You can use the procedures here to install any app.

Warning: Not all apps are designed to be “hot deployed”—deployed while the server is running. Deploying that way can cause instabilities, such as class loading leaks and memory leaks. On production systems, avoid “hot deploying” apps whenever possible. See the best practices for managing apps in production.

Important: When uninstalling an app or module, make sure to use the same agent you used to install the app. For example, if you installed it with Marketplace, uninstall it with Marketplace. If you installed it with the file system, use the file system to uninstall it. If you installed it with the App Manager, however, use Blacklisting to uninstall it.

Using the Control Panel to Install Apps

To install an app manually from the Control Panel, navigate to Control Panel → Apps → App Manager, and select Upload from the options button (). In the Upload dialog, choose the app on your machine and then click Install. When the install completes, close the dialog and you’re ready to roll!

Figure 1: Installing an app via the Upload dialog in the App Manager is very simple.

Using Your File System to Install Apps

To install an app manually on the Liferay DXP server, put the app in the [Liferay Home]/deploy folder (the Liferay Home folder is typically the app server’s parent folder). That’s it. The auto deploy mechanism takes care of the rest.

You might now be thinking, “Whoa there! What do you mean by ‘the rest?’ What exactly happens here? And what if my app server doesn’t support auto deploy?” These are fantastic questions! When you put an app in the [Liferay Home]/deploy folder, the OSGi container deploys the app to the appropriate subfolder in [Liferay Home]/osgi. By default, the following subfolders are used for apps matching the indicated file type:

• marketplace: Marketplace LPKG packages
• modules: OSGi modules
• war: WAR files

You can, however, change these subfolders by setting the properties module.framework.base.dir and module.framework.auto.deploy.dirs in a portal-ext.properties file. These properties define the [Liferay Home]/osgi folder and its hot deploy subfolders, respectively. The default settings for these properties in the portal.properties file are as follows:

module.framework.base.dir=${liferay.home}/osgi

module.framework.auto.deploy.dirs=\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/configs,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/marketplace,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/modules,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/war

Note that the configs subfolder isn’t for apps: it’s for configuration files imported from other Liferay DXP instances.

But what happens if your app server doesn’t support auto deploy? No problem! Liferay DXP’s module framework (OSGi) enables auto deploy. Any app server running Liferay DXP therefore also supports this auto deploy mechanism.

Manually Deploying an LPKG App

When manually installing an LPKG app, the installation may hang with a server log message like this:

14:00:15,789 INFO  [com.liferay.portal.kernel.deploy.auto.AutoDeployScanner][AutoDeployDir:252] Processing Liferay Push 2.1.0.lpkg

This happens when LPKG apps have the restart-required=true property in their liferay-marketplace.properties file (inside the LPKG file). This property setting specifies that a server restart is required to complete the installation.