To make it easy to configure Liferay optimally for your use, the first thing you see when browsing to your newly installed Liferay bundle is a setup wizard. This gives you a convenient way to configure Liferay for your purposes.
There are three sections of the wizard: the portal, the adminstrator and the database. For the portal, you need to supply the following information:
Portal Name: the name of the web site you’re powering with Liferay. In this
book, we’ll build a social network for your nose. This site is called Nosester
so we’ve supplied Nosester in the screenshot below.
Default Language: choose the default locale where your site resides.
For the adminstrator, you need to supply the following information:
First Name: the first name of the user that has the administrator account.
Last Name: the last name of the user that has the administrator account.
Email: the email address of the user that has the administrator account.
Figure 14.2: Supply the information for your site and your site's administrative account in the setup wizard.
Liferay supports just about all the leading databases today:
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DB2
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Ingres
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MySQL
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Oracle
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PostgreSQL
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SQL Server
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Sybase
In addition to these, Liferay also supports a few embedded databases that are designed for development. We haven’t listed these here because you’re setting up a production Liferay server and you shouldn’t use an embedded database with a production box.
Before you fill out the database section of Liferay’s setup wizard, you should already have created a database for Liferay to use. This database must have UTF-8 as its character set, because Liferay is an internationalized application and needs the UTF-8 character set to display text in many different languages. Check the documentation for your database to see how to do this.
Once you have your database created, create a user that can do anything to the database, including create and drop tables. It’s important that this user has complete rights over the Liferay database, because Liferay manages its own tables. Once you have your database and the credentials for this user, you can continue.
Open the Database section of the wizard. From the select box, choose your database. You’ll see a form which lets you specify the URL to the database, the driver class and the user credentials (see below). Most of this is filled out already; all you should need to do is supply the name of your database and the server it’s running on, as well as the user credentials.
Figure 14.3: Fill out the information for your database. We've chosen MySQL in this example and have created a database called *nosester* to hold our Liferay data.
Once you’ve filled out the form, click Finish Configuration. You’ll see a
message stating that Liferay is being installed as it creates the tables and
data it needs in its database. When it’s finished, it tells you the location of
the configuration file (portal-setup-wizard.properties) where it saved all of
your settings. From here, you can go to your home page.
Congratulations! You’ve just installed Liferay Portal! The next thing you need to do is set up your mail configuration, so Liferay can send email notifications to users. This is covered in the Manual Configuration section below.