Using an overridden configuration file

Liferay's properties files differ from the configuration files of most other products in that changing the default configuration file is discouraged. In fact, the file that contains all of the defaults is stored inside of a .jar file, making it more difficult to customize. Why is it set up this way? Because Liferay uses the concept of overriding the defaults in a separate file, rather than going in and customizing the default configuration file. You put just the settings you want to customize in your own configuration file, and then the configuration file for your portal is uncluttered and contains only the settings you need. This makes it far easier to determine whether a particular setting has been customized, and it makes the settings more portable across different installations of Liferay.

The default configuration file is called portal.properties, and it resides inside the portal-impl.jar file. This .jar file is in Liferay Portal's WEB-INF/lib folder. The file that is used to override the configuration is portal-ext.properties if you've created a custom file, or portal-setup-wizard.properties if you've used Liferay's setup wizard. This file is created in your Liferay Home folder (please see Chapter 11: Installing Liferay for the location of this folder for your application server). What follows are brief descriptions of the options that you can customize, thus overriding the defaults from the portal.properties file. These are presented in a logical order, not an alphabetical one, as many properties relate to other properties in the system.