Deploying Liferay Plugins with Maven

With Maven, it’s easy to deploy plugins to a Liferay Portal instance. This tutorial explain the process. Just follow these steps:

1. Make sure you’ve specified the Liferay specific properties (the properties starting with liferay.) in your plugin’s (or your parent plugin’s) pom.xml. See the Using Maven Parent Plugin Projects tutorial for descriptions of these Liferay properties.

   Here’s an example where these properties are specified for a Liferay instance bundled with Apache Tomcat in the directory C:\liferay-portal-6.2:

   <properties>
   	<liferay.app.server.deploy.dir>
   		C:\liferay-portal-6.2\tomcat-7.0.42\webapps
   	</liferay.app.server.deploy.dir>
   
   	<liferay.app.server.lib.global.dir>
   		C:\liferay-portal-6.2\tomcat-7.0.42\lib\ext
   	</liferay.app.server.lib.global.dir>
   
   	<liferay.app.server.portal.dir>
   		C:\liferay-portal-6.2\tomcat-7.0.42\webapps\root
   	</liferay.app.server.portal.dir>
   
   	<liferay.auto.deploy.dir>
   		C:\liferay-portal-6.2\deploy
   	</liferay.auto.deploy.dir>
   
   	<liferay.maven.plugin.version>
   		6.2.0-GA1
   	</liferay.maven.plugin.version>
   
   	<liferay.version>
   		6.2.0-GA1
   	</liferay.version>
   </properties>
   

2. In your command prompt, navigate to your Liferay plugin project’s directory.

3. Package your plugin by entering

   mvn package
   

   Your command output should be similar to the following output:

   [INFO] Building war:
   E:\liferay-plugins-maven\sample-parent-project\sample-portlet\target\sample-
   portlet-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war
   ...
   [INFO] --------------------------------------------------------------------
   [INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
   [INFO] --------------------------------------------------------------------
   

4. Deploy the plugin into your Liferay bundle by entering

   mvn liferay:deploy
   

   The command output should look similar to the following output:

   [INFO] Deploying sample-portlet-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war to [liferay version]\deploy
   [INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------------
   [INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
   [INFO] ---------------------------------------------------------------------
   

   Your Liferay console output shows your plugin deploying. It looks like this:

   INFO: Deploying web application directory [liferay version]\[tomcat version]
   \webapps\sample-portlet
   INFO  [pool-2-thread-2][HotDeployImpl:178] Deploying sample-portlet from que
   ue
   INFO  [pool-2-thread-2][PluginPackageUtil:1033] Reading plugin package for s
   ample-portlet
   

   Note: If you get the following error after executing mvn liferay:deploy, make sure you’re executing the command from your plugin’s directory (e.g., sample-portlet)–not your parent project’s directory.

   [ERROR] No plugin found for prefix 'liferay' in the current project and in the plugin groups [org.apache.maven.plugins, org.codehaus.mojo] available from the repositories [local (C:\Users\cdhoag\.m2\repository), central (http://repo.maven .apache.org/maven2)] -> [Help 1]

5. If you’re deploying the plugin to a release or snapshot repository, specify the repository by adding a distribution management section to your plugin’s pom.xml or your parent project’s pom.xml.

   Here’s an example distribution management section for a snapshot repository:

   <distributionManagement>
       <repository>
           <id>liferay-releases</id>
           <url>http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/repositories/liferay-releases</url>
       </repository>
       <snapshotRepository>
           <id>liferay-snapshots</id>
           <name>Liferay Snapshots Repository</name>
           <url>http://localhost:8081/nexus/content/repositories/liferay-snapshots</url>
       </snapshotRepository>
   </distributionManagement>
   

   The proper contents for your <distributionManagement> element can be found in the Summary tab for each of your repositories.

   

   Figure 2.29: Select the *Summary* tab of your repository to see how to specify it for distribution management in your plugin's POM.

   If you created the plugin as a snapshot, you’ll have to deploy it to a snapshot repository. You can deploy a plugin as a release, but the plugin’s POM must specify a valid release version (e.g., <version>1.0</version>), not a snapshot version (e.g., <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>).

6. Deploy your plugin into your specified Nexus repository:

   mvn deploy
   

Your plugin is now available in your Nexus repository!

Note: There are three build phases you’ll use when developing plugins with Maven:

• In Maven’s compile phase, explicit dependencies are downloaded to your local repository (i.e., .m2/repository/com/liferay/portal).
• In Maven’s package phase, the plugin’s inferred dependencies are downloaded to your local repository (i.e., .m2/repository).
• In Maven’s install phase, your plugin is installed to your local repository.

Congratulations on deploying your plugin to Liferay and to your repository!

Related Topics

Deploying Plugins