Creating a Liferay Workspace with Blade CLI

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to generate a Liferay Workspace using Blade CLI. The Blade CLI tool you installed in the Installing Blade CLI section provides many different commands to help build and customize Liferay projects. The first thing you should do before building and customizing projects is create a Liferay Workspace. You can use Blade CLI to generate a Gradle or Maven based workspace. For more information on managing a Liferay Workspace built with Maven, see the Maven Workspace tutorial.

Your workspace is the home for all your custom Liferay projects. Navigate to the folder where you want your workspace and run the following command to build a Gradle based workspace:

blade init -v 7.1 [WORKSPACE_NAME]

To create a Maven based workspace, run this instead:

blade init -v 7.1 -b maven [WORKSPACE_NAME]

Note: The version you set when first initializing your workspace is stored in the workspace’s .blade.properties file with the liferay.version.default property. This version is applied when creating projects based on the corresponding project template versions.

If you wish to develop projects for a different Liferay DXP version, you can pass a different version in the Blade init command. For example,

blade init -v 7.0 [WORKSPACE_NAME]

Initializing a workspace requires no downloading or access to the internet.

If you have a Plugins SDK and are looking to migrate to Liferay Workspace using Blade CLI, navigate to your Plugins SDK root folder and run the following command:

blade init -u

This command builds a workspace and automatically adds and configures your current Plugins SDK environment for use inside the workspace. See the Configuring a Plugins SDK in Your Workspace section for more details on the init -u command. See the Using a Plugins SDK From Your Workspace section for more information on how to use a Plugins SDK from within a workspace.

Once your workspace is generated, look at its folder structure. Several folders and build/properties files were autogenerated:

• configs
• gradle
• modules
• themes
• .blade.properties
• build.gradle
• gradle-local.properties
• gradle.properties
• gradlew
• gradlew.bat
• platform.bndrun
• settings.gradle

The build/properties files included in your workspace’s root directory sets your workspace’s Gradle properties and facilitates the build processes of your modules. You can learn more about these generated files/folders in the Configuring a Liferay Workspace tutorial. You’ll learn about how to use these folders and properties files throughout the next few tutorials.

Next you’ll learn about generating and using a Liferay DXP instance from within your workspace.

Running a Liferay Instance from Your Workspace

As discussed in the Configuring a Liferay Workspace tutorial, Liferay Workspaces can generate and hold a Liferay Server. This lets you build/test your plugins against a running Liferay instance. Once you’ve properly generated and installed a Liferay server in your workspace, you can begin using it with Blade CLI. To start your Liferay instance, run

blade server start

This command starts your Liferay server in a separate window. You also have the option to run your server in debug mode (-d).

Awesome! You have a built-in Liferay server in your workspace and can start the server using Blade CLI.