Installing Liferay on an existing application server

This section contains detailed instructions for installing Liferay Portal using its .war file distribution. This allows system administrators to deploy Liferay in existing application server installations. It is recommended that you have a good understanding of how to deploy Java EE applications in your application server of choice.

Installing Liferay in five easy steps

There are five generic steps to installing Liferay on an existing application server:

1. Obtain the Liferay .war file and the dependencies archive from the Help Center.

2. Shut your application server down.

3. Extract the dependencies to a location on your server’s global classpath. This allows both Liferay and plugins to access these dependencies.

4. Start your application server.

5. Deploy the Liferay .war file.

The instructions below are specific for each application server that Liferay supports. Liferay supports a wide combination of application servers and databases. Because of this, this section assumes MySQL as the database, that the database has already been created, and that you’re using the setup wizard. If you’re not using the setup wizard, see the sections above for information on how to set up Liferay manually.

We also assume your application server is already installed and running successfully. If you still need to install your application server, please follow your vendor’s instructions first.

Since Liferay uses the UTF-8 character encoding, make sure that your application server has the Java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 parameter set before you proceed. Note that different application servers provide different means for setting this parameter. For example, in Tomcat this parameter goes in the setenv.sh or setenv.bat script. For other application servers, this parameter might go in a different script or might have to be set through an administration console.

The following instructions assume an installation on a local machine. When installing to a remote server, substitute localhost with the host name or IP of the server.

Tip: Note that Liferay requires JDK 6 or greater. Do not attempt to install Liferay 6.2 on an application server that runs under Java 5 or lower; it will not work. If you are running an application server that ships with a JDK and that JDK is version 5 or lower, you’ll need to upgrade your application server to run current versions of Liferay Portal.

Without further ado, let’s get to the application servers. The first one we’ll cover is Mule Tcat. If you don’t have an application server preference, and you want support all the way down to the application server from Liferay, then Mule Tcat is your solution. After we cover Mule Tcat, we’ll look at all the supported application servers in alphabetical order.