Creating Liferay Maven Plugins from Liferay IDE

Liferay offers many archetypes to help create Maven projects for multiple plugin types. These types include portlet, theme, hook, and layout template plugins. To make sure that you can find the archetypes you need, Liferay provides archetypes for each of these plugin types for various versions of Liferay. Archetype is Maven’s project templating toolkit. This tutorial explains how to use Archetype to create a Liferay portlet project. With Archetype, you can use the same steps detailed below to generate Liferay plugin projects of any type.

As a prerequisite to running Archetype, make sure Maven is installed and that its executable is in your $PATH environment variable. Maven must also be fully configured. To configure Maven, follow the steps in the Setting Up Maven tutorial.

There are two ways of creating Liferay plugins with Maven: using Liferay IDE and using the command line. This tutorial demonstrates using Liferay IDE to create them.

Creating Liferay Maven Plugins Using Liferay IDE

In the following steps, you’ll learn how to use Maven archetypes to generate a Liferay plugin project using Liferay IDE:

Select File → New → Liferay Plugin Project.
Assign a project name and display name.

As you enter the project name, the wizard helps you by filling in the display name based on it. For example, if you specified sample-portlet as the project name, the wizard conveniently inserts Sample in grayed-out text as the portlet’s default display name. The wizard derives the default display name from the project name, starts it in upper-case, and leaves off the plugin type suffix (e.g., Portlet) because the plugin type is automatically appended to the display name in Liferay Portal. The IDE saves you from repetitively appending the plugin type to the display name; in fact, the IDE ignores any plugin type suffix if you happen to append it to the display name.

Figure 1: You can build a Liferay Plugin Project using Maven by completing the setup wizard.
Select Maven (liferay-maven-plugin) for the build type. Notice that some of the options for your plugin project changed, including the Location field, which is set to the user’s workspace by default.

If you have a parent plugin project directory in which you want to create the plugin project, specify the parent plugin project directory for the Location. It’s a best practice to create a parent project for your Maven plugins, so they can all share common project information. See the Using Liferay Maven Parent Plugin Projects tutorial for details.
Specify the Artifact version. For example, you can specify 1.0-SNAPSHOT to indicate that your project’s artifact will be a snapshot.
Specify the Group id. For example, you can specify your project’s root Java package, like com.liferay.sample.
Specify the Active profiles that you’d like your Liferay plugin project to use.

If you don’t remember your active profile or haven’t created one, click the Select Active Profiles icon immediately to the right of the text field. Any active profiles you have are listed in the menu on the left. To select an existing profile, highlight its profile ID and select the illuminated right arrow button to transfer it to the menu on the right. If you don’t have any existing profile, click on the green addition button to create a profile and give it an ID.

Figure 2: Liferay IDE lets you select active profiles to use with your Maven plugin projects.

If you’re specifying a new profile, the wizard will still create your plugin, but your project will need further attention before it is deployable. You’ll need to specify the necessary properties within the new profile; the Configuring Your Liferay Maven Project section of the Using Maven From Liferay IDE tutorial demonstrates specifying these properties.

You also have the option to create a profile based on a Liferay runtime. To do this, select the Create New Maven Profile Based on Liferay Runtime button to the far right of the Active profiles text field.

Figure 3: You can create new profiles in the New Plugin Project wizard.

Specify the Liferay runtime, New profile id, and Liferay version. For the new profile location you can specify your profile in the settings.xml (recommended) or your project’s pom.xml. When creating your Maven profile based on a Liferay runtime, the IDE automatically populates the new profile with the required properties and no additional profile configuration is needed for the plugin.
Select your project’s plugin type from the selection box of that name. The New Project Wizard gives you some additional options if you select Portlet or Service Builder Portlet. With both portlet types, you can use the Include Sample Code checkbox to instruct the New Project Wizard to add basic sample code to your portlet. If you select Portlet, you also get a checkbox for instructing the wizard to launch the New Portlet Wizard after the project is created. The New Portlet Wizard guides you in creating custom portlet classes.
Unless you’re creating a portlet or theme, you’re done–just click Finish and start developing your plugin in Liferay IDE! If you’re creating a portlet or theme, click Next.

If you’re creating a portlet, the second screen of the wizard is where you select the portlet’s framework. If you selected the Include Sample Code checkbox on the first screen of the wizard, then the second screen also lets you enter the portlet’s name and display name. For the portlet’s framework, you can select Liferay MVC, JSF 2.x, or Vaadin. If you select JSF 2.x here, you must then click Next to go to the third screen of the wizard where you select the JSF component suite to use. You can choose from JSF standard, ICEfaces, Liferay Faces Alloy, PrimeFaces, and RichFaces component suites.

Figure 4: Select a portlet framework to use for your new portlet.

Figure 5: If you're using JSF as your portlet framework, then you need to select the JSF component suite to use.

If you’re creating a theme, the second screen of the New Project Wizard lets you select a theme parent and theme framework. The Theme Parent dropdown lets you choose the _unstyled, _styled, or classic parent theme. The Theme Framework dropdown lets you choose Velocity, Freemarker, or JSP as your theme framework.

Figure 6: If you're creating a theme, select the theme parent and theme framework.