From the Plugins SDK to Liferay Workspace

The Liferay Plugins SDK is not available for Liferay DXP 7.1. Visit the Deprecated Apps in 7.1: What To Do article for more information on the Plugins SDK removal. Liferay Workspace succeeds the Plugins SDK as Liferay’s opinionated development environment. You should use it if you’re not using an alternative build system like Gradle or Maven.

Here are Workspace’s key features:

• Module and component templates
• Sample projects
• Portal server configurations
• Project validation
• Integration testing
• Folder structure flexibility
• Commands to migrate plugins, install Liferay DXP bundles, and start/stop Portal instances

The plugin upgrade tutorials later in this series show how Liferay Dev Studio automatically adapts existing plugins to Liferay DXP 7.1. There’s also a tutorial that demonstrates how you can optionally migrate traditional plugins to Workspace.

Figure 1: Liferay Dev Studio DXP's Upgrade Planner automates many aspects of the plugin upgrade process.

Here’s an example Workspace folder structure:

Figure 2: Liferay Workspace aggregates projects to use the same server configurations and Gradle build environment.

Here’s the Workspace anatomy:

• bundles/ (generated) → default folder for Liferay DXP bundles
• configs/ → holds Portal server configurations
• ext/ → holds Ext modules and Ext WAR files
• gradle/ → holds the Gradle wrapper files
• modules/ → holds module projects
• plugins-sdk/ (generated) → holds plugins from previous releases
• themes/ → holds theme projects created with the Liferay Theme Generator, which use the Liferay JS Theme Toolkit
• wars/ → holds traditional web application projects
• build.gradle → common Gradle build file
• gradle-local.properties → sets user-specific properties for your workspace
• gradle.properties → specifies the Portal server configuration and project locations
• gradlew / gradlew.bat → executes the Gradle command wrapper
• pom.xml (only in Workspaces generated by Maven) → common Maven build file
• settings.gradle → applies plugins to the Workspace and configures its dependencies

Workspace module, theme, and WAR projects use the same Portal server configurations. Developers can create configurations for module development, user acceptance testing, production, and more.

Each subfolder under configs holds a Portal server configuration defined by its portal-ext.properties file. The Gradle property liferay.workspace.environment in Workspace’s gradle.properties file specifies the configuration to use. See the Testing Projects section for more details.

Other Gradle properties set root locations for the Liferay DXP bundle, modules, themes, and a Plugins SDK. See the Gradle Workspace Properties section for a list of all available Workspace properties.

Workspace Folder Structure Properties

Property	Description
liferay.workspace.environment	Name of a configs subfolder holding the Portal server configuration to use
liferay.workspace.ext.dir	Ext projects root folder
liferay.workspace.home.dir	Liferay DXP bundle root folder
liferay.workspace.modules.dir	Module projects root folder
liferay.workspace.plugins.sdk.dir	Plugins SDK root folder
liferay.workspace.themes.dir	Theme projects root folder
liferay.workspace.wars.dir	WAR-style projects root folder

Workspace has Gradle tasks equivalent to the Plugins SDK Ant targets.

Plugins SDK to Workspace Task Map

Plugins SDK Ant Target	Workspace Gradle Task	Task Description
build-css	buildCSS	Builds CSS files
build-lang	buildLang	Translates language keys using Language Builder
build-service	buildService	Runs Service Builder
clean	clean	Deletes all build outputs
compile	classes	Compiles classes
deploy	deploy (or blade deploy)	Installs the current project to Liferay DXP’s OSGi framework
jar	jar	Compiles the project and packages it as a JAR file
war	assemble	Assembles project output

Other Workspace Gradle tasks provide additional functionality.

Workspace Gradle Task	Task Description
buildDB	Builds database SQL scripts from the generic SQL scripts
buildSoy	Compiles Closure Templates in JavaScript functions
components	Lists the project’s components
configJSModules	Generates the config file needed to load AMD files via combo loader in Liferay DXP
dependencies	Lists the project’s declared dependencies
formatSource	Runs Liferay Source Formatter to format project files
initBundle	Downloads and installs a Liferay DXP bundle
model	Lists the project’s configuration model
projects	Lists the project’s sub-projects
properties	Lists the project’s
replaceSoyTranslation	Replaces goog.getMsg definitions
transpileJS	Transpiles the project’s JavaScript files

This is just a subset of available Gradle commands in a Liferay Workspace. Run gradlew tasks from a project in workspace for a full list of Gradle commands.