Liferay Skeleton

This project contains an Ansible playbook to set up a Liferay Portal server. It can either be used to set up a test, stage, production or any other environment, as well as provisioning a Vagrant VM for development purposes.

Setup/provisioning includes the installation of a Liferay Portal server and its prerequisites:

• a MySQL database
• a Java 7 JDK
• a Liferay 6.2 Tomcat bundle.

Prerequisites

Starting and provisioning the VM requires the following software packages to be installed:

• Vagrant (Only for dev environment with Vagrant)
• Ansible

Please note that the download tasks in (some of) the role submodules require passwordless sudo on Your local host, because the archives are cached a directory, that normally isn't beyond user access (see local_ansible_data_path configuration).

Development environment with Vagrant

With the provided default configuration for the development environment with Vagrant, the auto deploy directory of the Liferay Portal server is accessible from outside the VM, so that each (developed) extension can be deployed only by copying its *.war archive to that directory.

Starting and using the VM

See Vagrant Documentation how to work with Vagrant. Important commands are:

vagrant up
vagrant provision
vagrant halt
vagrant destroy

Using the VM

After the VM is successfully started and provisioned, open http://localhost:8080/ in a browser and follow the requested steps. Sign in with the default admin user:

• Email Address: [email protected]
• Password: test

If an enterprise edition of the Liferay Portal server is installed, a file containing a valid license has to be provided. It can simply be copied into the liferay-deploy directory and the server will automatically apply it.

Extension development

The extension development might e.g. be organised in a Maven (multi module) project. It should be configured with the path to the liferay-deploy directory.

Server setup with Ansible

The Ansible playbook, that is used to provision the Vagrant VM, can also be used to set up the Liferay system (including MySQL and Java) on other environments (servers), too. For each additional environment, an inventory file ansible/inventory/[environment] has to be created. Replicate an existing inventory file and adjust its contents regarding to the new environment and/or see the documentation on the Ansible home page: Ansible Docs - Inventory. If the new environment requires custom configurations, create a file ansible/host_vars/[environment].yml and configure the variables that should be overwritten.

To run the setup call:

ansible-playbook ansible/playbook.yml \
                 -i ansible/inventory/[environment]

Variables for Liferay version

The default variables define the (currently) latest version of the Liferay Portal server for installation. If a server should be set up with another version, those variables can be overwritten, e.g. in the regarding ansible/host_vars/[environment].yml file for the server to be set up. Prefedined variables for known versions can be found in the directory ansible/roles/liferay/vars/versions and can simply be overwritten in the ansible/host_vars/[environment].yml file.