Liferay: How to configure Liferay Portal

Question

How to configure or to override Liferay portal properties with portal.properties?

Answer 1

Liferay properties is powerful instrument that allows us to configure Portal behaviour without coding of hooks-, ext- and theme-plugin. By new requirement we proof at first for possibility to solve this requirement with change of Liferay configuration. The default properties configuration can be found at Liferay source code: https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/blob/master/portal-impl/src/portal.properties or in https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/blob/master/portal-impl/src/portal.properties or in liferay-bundles\tomcat-7\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib\portal-impl.jar

To configure or to override configuration properties of Liferay portal we have to create portal-ext.properties at root folder of Liferay (bundled with tomcat).

Liferay
|-data
|-deploy
|-license
|-logs
|-tomcat-7.xxx
|-portal-ext.propeties        <- override portal properties
|-portal-${user}.propeties    <- override user specific properties

Usual we work in team with version control systems like git or svn, and developers have different configuration like database path etc. Liferay allows to configure user specific configuration in e.g. portal-${user}.properties. Therefor put at first to the portal-ext.properties the inclusion of user properties:

include-and-override = ${default.liferay.home}/portal-${user.name}.properties

Answer 2

Remember that when you edit portal properties in the GUI (Control Panel -> Configuration -> Portal Settings), these changes take preference over whatever you have in portal-ext.properties. So if you have, let's say, a default landing page specified in Portal Settings, whatever value you put in portal-ext.properties (default.landing.page.path=/your/path) is ignored.

Answer 3

Do not edit the portal.properties file. If you want to override any of the property, if not exists portel-ext.properties file in your liferay_home or ROOT/classes folder then create portel-ext.properties file in liferay_home and add your property entry in it. Restart server to see changes.

See all properties you can override portal-ext.properties