Installing Apps Manually

By default, apps you download in a running Liferay instance via Liferay Marketplace install automatically. But what if the app you want to install isn’t on Marketplace? What if all you have is the app’s file? In this case, you must install the app manually. This article shows you how to do this. You can use the procedures here to install any app.

Important: When uninstalling an app or module, make sure to use the same agent as you used to install the app. If you installed it with Marketplace, uninstall it with Marketplace. If you installed it with the file system, use the file system to uninstall it. If you installed it with the App Manager, however, use Blacklisting to uninstall it.

Using the Control Panel to Install Apps

To install an app manually via your running Liferay instance, navigate to Control Panel → Apps → App Manager, and select Upload from the options button (). In the Upload dialog, choose the app on your machine, and then click Install. When the install completes, close the dialog and you’re ready to roll!

Figure 1: Installing an app via the Upload dialog in your Liferay instance's App Manager is very simple.

Next, you’ll learn how to install an app manually via your file system.

Using Your File System to Install Apps

To install an app manually via the file system your Liferay instance is running on, put the app in the [Liferay_Home]/deploy folder. That’s it. Liferay’s hot deploy mechanism takes care of the rest.

You might now be thinking, “Whoa there! What do you mean by ‘the rest’? What exactly does Liferay do here? And what if my app server doesn’t support hot deploy?” These are fantastic questions! When you put an app in the [Liferay_Home]/deploy folder, Liferay’s OSGi container deploys the app to the appropriate subfolder in [Liferay_Home]/osgi. By default, the following subfolders are used for apps matching the indicated file type:

• marketplace: Marketplace LPKG packages
• modules: OSGi modules
• war: WAR files

You can, however, change these subfolders by setting the properties module.framework.base.dir and module.framework.auto.deploy.dirs in a portal-ext.properties file. These properties define the [Liferay_Home]/osgi folder and its hot deploy subfolders, respectively. The default settings for these properties in Liferay’s portal.properties file are as follows:

module.framework.base.dir=${liferay.home}/osgi

module.framework.auto.deploy.dirs=\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/configs,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/marketplace,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/modules,\
    ${module.framework.base.dir}/war

Note that the configs subfolder isn’t for apps: it’s for configuration files imported from other Liferay instances.

But what happens if your app server doesn’t support hot deploy? No problem! Liferay’s module framework (OSGi) enables hot deploy. Any app server running Liferay therefore also supports Liferay’s hot deploy mechanism.

Manually Deploying an LPKG App

When manually installing an LPKG app, the installation may hang with a server log message like this:

14:00:15,789 INFO  [com.liferay.portal.kernel.deploy.auto.AutoDeployScanner][AutoDeployDir:252] Processing Liferay Push 2.1.0.lpkg

This happens when LPKG apps have the restart-required=true property in their liferay-marketplace.properties file (inside the LPKG file). This property setting specifies that a server restart is required to complete the installation.