Connecting to LCS

Note: LCS is deprecated and will be shut down on December 31, 2021. Customers who activate LCS are advised to replace it with our latest activation key type which is suitable for virtualized environments.

For further information, please see Changes to Liferay Product Activation.

Follow these steps to connect your Liferay Portal server to LCS:

1. Ensure that you’ve completed the LCS preconfiguration steps.

2. Log in to lcs.liferay.com. This takes you to your company’s LCS project. If your company has multiple projects, select the one you want to register this server under from the menu to the right of the Dashboard tab.

   

   Figure 4.4: Select your LCS project from the menu highlighted by the red box in this screenshot.

3. Select or create the environment to connect your server to. If you’re activating your server with LCS, your server will consume an activation key from the subscription type assigned to the environment. Note that a subscription type can only be assigned to an environment when creating the environment. If you have sufficient permissions in your company’s project, you can create a new environment by selecting Add Environment.

   

   Figure 4.5: To connect to LCS, you must register your Liferay Portal server in an LCS environment. The red box in this screenshot highlights environments.

4. Select the environment’s Registration tab. This is where you manage and download the environment’s token file, which you’ll use to connect servers to the environment.

   In the Registration tab’s Services section, change the LCS service selections, if needed. Note that if you change the LCS service selections and there are servers already connected to the environment, then you must regenerate the token file and use it to reconnect those servers to LCS. You’ll regenerate and/or download the token in the next step.

   The selected services are enabled for all servers that connect to this environment. Portal Analytics, Fix Pack Management, and Portal Property Analysis are selected by default. If Portal Property Analysis is selected, you can prevent LCS from analyzing specific properties. Enter them into the box that appears when you select Show Blacklisted Properties. Note that LCS doesn’t access security sensitive properties.

   

   Figure 1: An environment's Registration tab lets you manage the token file used to connect your server to the environment.

5. What you do now depends on what you did in the previous step:

   • Changes to LCS service selections: Regenerate and download the token. Regenerating a token causes all servers using the old token to disconnect from LCS. You must reconnect them using the new token.
   • No changes to LCS service selections: Download the token.

6. Place the token file in your server’s [Liferay Home]/data folder. Note that Liferay Home is usually the parent folder of the application server’s folder. If your server is running, it should connect to LCS in about 1 minute. If your server isn’t running, it connects to LCS on startup. Upon connection, your server appears in LCS. If you’re activating your server with LCS, your server consumes an activation key from the environment’s subscription type. You should see this in your LCS project’s Subscriptions tab.

7. Celebrate! Your Liferay Portal server is connected to LCS.

Note: You may be wondering what happens if LCS goes offline. Don’t worry, this won’t cause a rift in the space-time continuum. LCS is deployed on a global cloud infrastructure set up for automatic failure recovery. The potential for non-availability is very low. In the event of an outage, however, registered servers maintain a local copy of their uptime information to transmit to LCS when it comes back online. If you’re using LCS for activation, active subscriptions have a 30-day grace period to re-establish connectivity and remain valid. This is ample time for LCS to come back online. Should an extended LCS outage occur, Liferay Support can provide activation keys that don’t require LCS.

In your Liferay Portal instance, you can view your LCS connection status in the LCS client app. Access the client by clicking Control Panel → Apps → Liferay Connected Services.

Here’s a full description of what a connected LCS client app displays:

• Connection Uptime: The duration of the client’s connection with LCS.
• Last Message Received: The time the LCS client received the latest connection message from LCS. These messages occur only upon connection/reconnection and are unrelated to server metrics. It’s therefore common for a long period of time to pass before the client receives another such message for a reconnection event.
• Services: The LCS services enabled for this Liferay Portal instance. Note that all Liferay Portal instances that connect to the same LCS environment must use the same set of LCS services. LCS services can’t be enabled on an instance-by-instance basis.
• Project Home: This link takes you to this server’s LCS project. The project home in LCS is also called the dashboard.
• Environment: This link takes you to this server’s LCS environment.
• Server Dashboard: This link takes you to the server on LCS.

Figure 4.6: The server is connected to LCS.

Awesome! Now you’re ready to use LCS. The next article shows you how to do this.