Installing a Bundle

Liferay bundles contain the same directory structure regardless of application server. The top-level folder is named for the release of Liferay. This folder is also sometimes called Liferay Home.

Inside this folder, you will find folders for various uses:

Data: This folder is used to store the embedded HSQL database which the bundles use, as well as the configuration and data for the Jackrabbit JSR-170 content repository and the Lucene search index.

Deploy: Plugins which you wish to deploy to Liferay can be copied into this folder. It is also used by Liferay's graphical plugin installer utility, which is available from the Control Panel.

License: Contains both Liferay's license and a file which describes the licenses for many of the other open source projects that are used internally by Liferay.

[Application Server]: There will also be an application server folder which is different depending on which bundle you have downloaded. This folder contains the application server in which Liferay has been installed.

In most cases, installing a bundle is as easy as uncompressing the archive and then starting the application server. For example, if you were to install Liferay Portal on Tomcat, you would simply unzip the bundle to a location of your choice.

Now you would start Tomcat in the same way as you would if you had downloaded it manually. Tomcat is launched by way of a script which is found in its bin folder. If you drop to a command prompt and go to this folder, you can launch Tomcat via the following command on Windows:

startup

or the following command on Linux / Mac / Unix:

./startup.sh

The Liferay / Tomcat bundle will then launch. If you are on Windows, you will see another command prompt window appear with Tomcat's console in it. If you are on Linux, you can see the Tomcat console by issuing the following command:

tail -f ../logs/catalina.out

Once Tomcat has completed its start up, it should automatically launch a web browser so you can see the home page. If it does not, launch your web browser and then go to the following address: http://localhost:8080. The default Liferay home page will then appear in your web browser. It will be using an embedded database for its configuration, but it is fully functional. You can now begin exploring the various features of Liferay.

Liferay ships by default with a sample web site included, called 7 Cogs. You can access this site and log in as the various users to get familiar with Liferay and what it can do.

Installing a different bundle is done in exactly the same way: unzip the bundle into the folder of your choice, launch the application server, and then view the portal in your web browser.

Illustration 2: Default Page in the Liferay BundlesAs you can see, bundles are the easiest way to get started with Liferay. They come pre-configured with a running Liferay that can be used immediately to explore all of the things that Liferay can do. And with minimal extra configuration (which we will see later), bundles can be converted into full production-ready systems.