Using Liferay's setup wizard

To make it easy to configure Liferay optimally for your use, the first thing you see when browsing to your newly installed Liferay bundle is a setup wizard. This gives you a convenient way to configure Liferay for your purposes.

There are three sections of the wizard: the portal, the adminstrator, and the database. For the portal, you need to supply the following information:

Portal Name: the name of the web site you're powering with Liferay. In this book, we'll build a social network for your nose. This site is called Nosester, so we've supplied Nosester in the screenshot below.

Default Language: choose the default locale where your site resides.

For the adminstrator, you need to supply the following information:

First Name: the first name of the user that has the administrator account.

Last Name: the last name of the user that has the administrator account.

Email: the email address of the user that has the administrator account.

Figure 11.2: Supply the information for your site and your site's administrative account in the setup wizard.

The database section can be a little bit technical. If you've downloaded Liferay for evaluation or demo purposes only, and you're not installing Liferay on server hardware to get it ready for your users, you can ignore the database section and click the Finish Configuration button. If, however, you're reading this section because you're installing Liferay for actual use, you'll need a separate database first.

Liferay supports just about all the leading databases today:

• DB2
• Ingres
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• Sybase

In addition to these, Liferay also supports a few embedded databases that are designed for development. We haven't listed these here because you're setting up a production Liferay server, and you shouldn't use an embedded database with a production box.

Before you fill out the database section of Liferay's setup wizard, go to your database software of choice and create a database for Liferay to use. This database must have UTF-8 as its character set, because Liferay is an internationalized application and needs the UTF-8 character set to display text in many different languages. Check the documentation for your database to see how to do this.

Once you have your database created, create a user which can do anything to the database, including create and drop tables. It's important that this user has complete rights over the Liferay database, because Liferay manages its own tables. Once you have your database and the credentials for this user, you can continue.

Open the Database section of the wizard. From the select box, choose your database. You'll see a form which then lets you specify the URL to the database, the driver class, and the user credentials (see below). Most of this is filled out already; all you should need to do is supply the name of your database and the server it's running on, as well as the user credentials.

Figure 11.3: Fill out the information for your database. We've chosen MySQL in this example, and have created a database called *nosester* to hold our Liferay data.

Once you've filled out the form, click Finish Configuration. You'll see a message stating that Liferay is being installed as it creates the tables and data it needs in its database. When it's finished, it tells you the location of the configuration file (portal-setup-wizard.properties) where it saved all of your settings. From here, you can go to your home page.

Congratulations! You've just installed Liferay Portal!

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Tip

The wizard is an extremely helpful tool, especially if you're setting up Liferay for the first time or creating a completely fresh portal instance. If you're a Liferay veteran and you already have your database information and various properties set up, you can skip the wizard by adding this line to your portal-ext.properties file:

setup.wizard.enabled=false

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As you can see, bundles are the easiest way to get started with Liferay. They come pre-configured with a running Liferay instance that can be used immediately to explore all of the things that Liferay can do. Bundles are the fastest way to create full production-ready Liferay installations.

Of course, it's not always possible to use a bundle. You may already have an application server upon which you want to install Liferay. The bulk of this chapter describes how to install Liferay on all the application servers it supports, both open source and proprietary.