Developer Mode

Do you want to develop Liferay resources without having to redeploy to see your portal modifications? Use Liferay Developer Mode! In Developer mode, all caches are removed, so any changes you make are visible right away. Also, you won’t have to reboot the server as often in Developer Mode.

Before you use Developer Mode, you’ll have to add the portal-developer.properties file to your application server’s configuration file. Each application server has a different configuration file or UI to specify system properties; so you’ll need to find out the specific method for your application server. Let’s demonstrate using the Tomcat application server.

In your setenv.sh file (setenv.bat in Windows), find the CATALINA_OPTS variable and add the following to the list of options:

-Dexternal-properties=portal-developer.properties

The following is an example of the CATALINA_OPTS variable lines with the external-properties option appended to the end (all code must be on one line):

CATALINA_OPTS=
    "$CATALINA_OPTS
     -Dfile.encoding=UTF8
     -Dorg.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.ENABLE_CLEAR_REFERENCES\
         =false
     -Duser.timezone=GMT
     -Xmx1024m
     -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
     -Dexternal-properties=portal-developer.properties"

If you’re already using the system property external-properties to load other properties files, add portal-developer.properties to the list and use a comma to separate it from other entries.

Note: Older versions of Liferay 6.1 bundled with Tomcat use the JAVA_OPTS variable line. This caused some performance issues and was changed to CATALINA_OPTS. If you have the JAVA_OPTS variable line in your setenv.sh or setenv.bat file, change the variable line to CATALINA_OPTS to take full advantage of the performance upgrade. More information on this change can be referenced in LPS-26464.

How does Developer Mode let you see your changes more quickly? In Developer Mode, there are several changes to the normal order of operations. Some of these key behaviors are listed below, along with the portal property override settings that trigger them:

• CSS files are loaded individually rather than being combined and loaded as a single CSS file (theme.css.fast.load=false).
• Layout template caching is disabled (layout.template.cache.enabled=false).
• The server does not launch a browser when starting up (browser.launcher.url=).
• FreeMarker Templates for themes and web content are not cached, so changes are applied immediately (freemarker.engine.resource.modification.check.interval=0).
• Minification of CSS and JavaScript resources is disabled (minifier.enabled=false).

Individual file loading of your styling and behaviors, combined with disabled caching for layout and FreeMarker templates, let’s you see your changes more quickly.

Now, when you modify your theme’s custom.css file directly in your Liferay Bundle, you can see your changes applied as you make them! Make sure you copy any changes you make back into your _diffs folder, or they’ll be overwritten when you redeploy your theme.

Let’s add a thumbnail image for our theme now.