Building Liferay Faces From Source

You may have several reasons for downloading and building Liferay Faces from its project source code:

To try out the latest cutting edge changes
To investigate a suspected bug
To learn how Liferay Faces is implemented

For this tutorial, you’ll learn how to access the Liferay Faces source code and build it yourself. The Liferay Faces source code is organized into several different Github repositories:

First, you’ll start with installing a Liferay Faces project.

Installing a Liferay Faces Project

It’s important to install the version of Liferay Faces that you want. So, it’s a good idea to check the Liferay Faces Version Scheme to confirm the version of Liferay Faces.

You can either install the project by cloning it from GitHub or by downloading it as a .zip file. Both options are demonstrated below.

Cloning the project from GitHub

Cloning the project requires that you set up Git on your machine. Once you’ve set up Git, you can download a Liferay Faces project from GitHub and work with a particular branch of the project, following these instructions:

Execute the following command from your terminal:
```
 git clone https://github.com/liferay/liferay-faces-[PROJECT]
```
Replace the [PROJECT] variable with the Liferay Faces project you desire (e.g., liferay-faces-bridge-impl.).
Navigate into that directory by executing cd liferay-faces-[PROJECT].
Checkout the branch (master is the default branch) you want to use.

For example, to use the 3.x version of source code, execute the following command:
```
 git checkout 3.x
```

Downloading the project as a .zip file

To download the Liferay Faces project as a .zip file, follow these instructions:

Visit the Liferay Faces project’s Github page.
Click on the branch drop-down menu and select the branch or tag for the version of the project that you’d like to use.
Click on the Clone or download → Download ZIP button on that right side of the page to download the [branch/tag name].zip file for that branch or tag.
Extract the .zip file contents to a location on your machine.
In a terminal window, navigate into the Liferay Faces project’s root directory:
```
 cd liferay-faces-[PROJECT]
```

Now that you’ve installed the Liferay Faces project, you can configure your environment for building the project. In the next section of this tutorial, you’ll explore building Liferay Faces with Maven.

Building Liferay Faces with Maven

Maven is required to build the Liferay Faces project. You can download Maven from http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi. It is recommended to place your Maven installation’s bin directory in your system’s $PATH, so you can run the Maven executable (mvn) easily from your terminal.

Some Liferay Faces project should rely on Liferay’s repository to download Maven artifacts over using Maven Central. To configure your Liferay Faces project to download from Liferay’s repo, add the following code snippet to your $HOME/.m2/settings.xml file:
```
 <repositories>
     <repository>
         <id>liferay-public</id>
         <url>https://repository.liferay.com/nexus/content/groups/public</url>
 </repository>
```
If a settings.xml file does not exist in your $HOME/.m2 folder, create it and add the code snippet.
Make sure you’re in your Liferay Faces project directory and, then, build the source with Maven by executing the following command:
```
 mvn clean package
```

Maven builds the Liferay Faces artifacts contained in that project. For example, running mvn clean package in the root folder of the liferay-faces-bridge-impl project produces the bridge-impl/target/liferay-faces-bridge-impl-[version].jar. Artifacts generated in other Liferay Faces projects follow a similar folder path.

That’s it; you’ve built Liferay Faces from source!

Creating and Deploying JSF Portlets

Developing Liferay Faces Portlets with Maven

Understanding Liferay Faces Bridge

« Migrating From PortletFaces to Liferay FacesIntroduction to Service Builder and Services »