Making Liferay Coexist with Other Java EE Applications

Liferay Portal by default is configured to sit at the root (i.e., /) of your application server. Dedicating your application server to running only Liferay Portal is a good practice, allowing for separation between your portal environment and your web application environment. This is generally a best practice for portals, which by definition are application development platforms in and of themselves. For that reason, your instance of Liferay is likely to be hosting many applications and even integrating several of them together on a single page. For this reason, you should design your system so your portal environment has all the resources it needs to do this. Configuring it so it is the sole consumer of any other .war files that get deployed to the application server helps to make sure your system performs optimally.

If, however, you want Liferay to share space on an application server with other applications, you can. In this instance, you may not want to make Liferay the default application in the root context of the server.

There are two steps to modifying this behavior:

1. Deploy Liferay in a context other than root (for example /portal).

2. Modify the portal-ext.properties file to tell Liferay the context to which it has been deployed.

   To change the file, open it in a text editor. Place the portal.ctx property at the top of the file:

    portal.ctx=/
   

This default setting defines Liferay Portal as the application that sits at the root context. If you change it to something else, say /portal, for example, you can then deploy Liferay in that context and it will live there instead of at the root context.

A full discussion of the portal-ext.properties file appears in Chapter 20.

Note for WebLogic Users: WebLogic also requires that you modify the weblogic.xml file which is included with Liferay. In this file are tags for the context root:

<context-root>/</context-root>

Change this so it matches the path you set in your portal-ext.properties file. You will have to modify the weblogic.xml file inside the Liferay .war before you deploy it. Extract the file from the .war file, modify it and then put it back in the .war file. Then deploy the modified Liferay .war file to the server in the proper context.