Liferay-Development for beginners – Part One – Setup your own instance

This little tutorial is written for users that are familiar with the following points, so they are not explained in detail:

• Working with linux (or any other OS of your choice), an editor like vi, etc.
• Install and configure a Mysql instance
• Creation of schema and assignment of user and rights

Before you start with configuration and the other thrilling things of liferay you have to stress you internet connection by downloading the necessary parts for a working Liferay instance.

The follwoing parts are at least needed for an instance. Hey can be found

• Liferay Community Portal (bundled with Tomcat)
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/
• Mysql Community Server
  http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Now install the Mysql Community Server and follow the installation process. After installation you have to create a new database and user that will be used by Liferay.

After the database stuff the Liferay Portal has now to be extracted to the folder of your choice. Now you have to create / modify the portal-ext.properties file that contains the basic configuration settings of your portal. You have to insert the following content:

Confiture your JDBC driver

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

Setup the db url with your db-name. If your db is on a different host you should replace localhost by the real db host name.

jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/<your-liferay-db>?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false

Now enter the the name of the liferay db user you have created

jdbc.default.username=<your-lifeay-db-user>

And enter the password you have assigned

jdbc.default.password=<your-lifeay-db-user-password>

The default liferay admin user is named admin, below you can also define every other name for your admin user.

default.admin.screen.name=admin

In the end enter the password of the admin user that should be initially assigned. If you later enter a different password on the control panel the new db based value overwrites the value of this properties file

default.admin.password=<your-lifeay-initial-admin-default-password>

The other values can be changed later when you are customizing the portal. Now go to the tomcat folder and their into the bin folder and start the tomcat server by running ./startup.sh .

That’s all. You can now explore your new portal.

Btw: The default root user is test@liferay.com with password test