Deployment

You will notice that when your project was created in the Plugins SDK, an ant script was also created for it. To deploy a plugin, you run the deploy ant task in your project.

ant deploy

This task will compile your plugin (theme or portlet), store it in a dist folder, and deploy your plugin to your local Liferay installation.

This is done by copying the plugin .war file to your Liferay hot deploy folder. If your local installation of Liferay is running, your plugin will be automatically picked up by the server and deployed. Watch your Liferay console for messages. When you see

<plugin> registered successfully.

in the console, your plugin has been deployed to the server and is ready for use.

If your plugin is a portlet, you can add it to a page by hovering over the Dock and clicking Add Content. Find your portlet in the category you specified in your liferay-display.xml file. If you have not yet customized the file, your portlet will be in the Samples category. Simply click the Add button next to it to add it to the page you are currently viewing.

If your plugin is a theme, you can choose it for the page you are viewing by hovering over the Dock and clicking Manage Pages. Go to the Look and Feel tab and your theme should be in the list. Select it and it will be applied to the page you are viewing. You can then click the Return to Full Page link and see your theme applied to the full page.