Initial Setup

Setting up your environment for Liferay development is very straightforward. First, download a fresh copy of Liferay Portal bundled with Tomcat from the Liferay website at http://www.liferay.com/downloads/. We recommend using Tomcat for development, as it is small, fast, and takes up less resources than most other servlet containers. Also download the Plugins SDK from the Additional Files page:

• • Unzip both archives to a folder of your choosing. Avoid using a folder name that contains spaces because some operating systems have problems running Java applications in folders with spaces in the name.

  • (Optional) By default Liferay Portal Community Edition comes bundled with many plugins. It's common to remove them to speed up the server startup. To do this, in the liferay-portal-[version]/tomcat-[tomcat-version]/webapps directory, delete all the directories except for ROOT and tunnel-web.

  • Start Liferay:

• • • Windows: navigate with the file browser to liferay-portal-[version]/tomcat-[tomcat-version]/bin and double click startup.bat. To shut the server down later, press Ctrl-C in the terminal window.

    • Linux and Mac OS X: open a terminal, navigate to liferay-portal-[version]/tomcat-[tomcat-version]/bin, enter the following command

./startup.sh

Once Liferay starts your browser should open to http://localhost:8080/ and you can login with the email test@liferay.com and password test.

Ant Configuration

Before you can begin developing portlets, you must first have some tools installed. Building projects in the Plugins SDK requires that you have Ant 1.7.0 or higher installed on your machine. Download the latest version of Ant from http://ant.apache.org/. Decompress the archive into a folder of your choosing.

Next, set an environment variable called ANT_HOME which points to the folder to which you installed Ant. Use this variable to add the binaries for Ant to your PATH by adding $ANT_HOME/bin to your PATH environment variable.

You can do this on Linux or Mac OS X by modifying your .bash_profile file as follows (assuming you installed Ant in /java):

export ANT_HOME=/java/apache-ant-1.8.1
export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin

Close and reopen your terminal window to make these settings take effect.

You can do this on Windows by going to Start -> Control Panel, and double-clicking the System icon. Go to Advanced, and then click the Environment Variables button. Under System Variables, select New. Make the Variable Name ANT_HOME and the Variable Value the path to which you installed Ant (e.g., c:\java\apache-ant-1.8.1), and click OK.

Scroll down until you find the PATH environment variable. Select it and click Edit. Add %ANT_HOME%\bin to the end of the Variable Value. Click OK, and then click OK again. Open a command prompt and type ant -version and press Enter. You should get and output similar to this:

Apache Ant(TM) version 1.8.2 compiled on December 20 2010

If not, check your environment variable settings and make sure they are pointing to the directory where you unzipped Ant.

Plugins SDK Configuration

Now that all the proper tools are in place, we must configure the Plugins SDK to be able to deploy into your Liferay instance. You will notice that the Plugins SDK contains a file called build.properties. This file contains the default settings about the location of your Liferay installation and your deployment folder. You can use this file as a reference, but you should not modify it directly (In fact you will see the message "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE" at the top if you open it). In order to override the default settings, create a new file in the same folder called build.${user.name}.properties, where ${user.name} is your user ID on your machine. For example, if your user name is jsmith (for John Smith), you would create a file called build.jsmith.properties.

Edit this file and add the following line:

app.server.dir=the directory containing your application server

In our case, app.server.dir should be the absolute path to your liferay-portal-[version]/tomcat-[tomcat-version] directory.

Save the file. You are now ready to start using the Plugins SDK.