Liferay With Multiple Server Instances

Question

I'm working with multiple Liferay Projects (different Portal, plugins, user and usergroups etc ) in the same time, and often have to switch between them. This switch requires lots of steps like

• Editing the portal-ext.properties (to change the Liferay Database, and edit some custom project-specific properties), and edit 'portal-setup-wizard.properties'
• Add/remove portlets themes and hooks from the Eclipse Server instance, sometimes clean the Tomcat's 'data' 'Webapps' and 'work' folder
• Go to Liferay's Control-Panel/Server/Plugins Installation and re-index portlets like 'Users and Organizations' or 'Documents and Media'

So, I thought that creating a new Server Instance for each project, with a new tomcat and JRE, would be a nice idea. When I had to switch project, I could just stop the old server and start another. At first, I thought (was adviced actually) that using the same Liferay Plugins SDK (6.1.0), should be ok, as long as the Server instances are the same version.

Practically this doesn't work 100% perfectly. While most of the work is getting done, there are some problems here and there, like a theme not getting deployed propertly, hooks not beeing applied etc. As I understand, there is some [Liferay SDK] - [Liferay Server] binding, and that means that only 1 Server (the first one I created) will fully work. For example, By investigating the [Liferay SDK folder]/bild.[user name].properties, I can see some properties that are referring to a specific Server/JRE location :

    app.server.portal.dir
app.server.lib.global.dir
app.server.deploy.dir
app.server.type
app.server.dir

So, my question is, what should I do to work with multiple Liferay Projects ?

1. Is the multi-Server practice, a good approach to work with multiple-projects ?
2. If yes, should I create a different SDK for each Server? Maybe a different Eclipse workspace too ? Or is there some way to use the same SDK
3. What about working with Servers of different Liferay Version ?

Answer 1

Personally, I set up every project with its own source, tomcat, database, etc. even if it means duplication. These days storage is cheap and makes this possible. Of course your milage may very but I thought I'd share my setup with you.

I have a project directory with all my projects which looks like so:

/projects
    /foo-project
    /bar-project
    /my-project

Inside a project I have

/my-project
    /tomcat
        /bin
        /conf
        ...
    /src
        /portal
            ... my portal source ...
        /plugins
            ... my plugin source ...
    /portal-ext.properties

• I then setup tomcat to use different ports (8080, 8081, 8082, etc...) so that I can just leave them all running if I have to or want to.
• I setup Liferay to use different database for each Liferay instance.
• I place the portal-ext.properties as a sibling to the tomcat directory and Liferay will read this file (assuming the default behavior). This offers quick and easy edits as well as figuring out how you've set each project up.

The advantages should be clear. You can just "walk away" from a project and into another without tearing down and setting up. And when you return everything will still be as you left it. Context switching is also quicker and helpful if you want to answer a question about a project you're not yet working on.

Depending on the complexity of each of your projects, multi-instance might not work for you. Hooks and EXTs may conflict with each other and it appears as if this is already the case with your projects.

If you can afford the space (which is not much) this has been the fastest way I have found as a Liferay developer.

Answer 2

If we start working on a new Liferay project in our company, we setup:

• a new database schema,
• a new, clean Liferay server connected with that schema and
• a fresh Eclipse workspace, with
• a clean SDK project

Only this way you're sure to have cleanly separate projects. To switch to another project, just shutdown the current Liferay server, startup the new one and switch to the right workspace in Eclipse. This all takes no more than 2 minutes, a lot less than to do all the cleanup actions you have to do if you share workspace and server.

In my opinion, this is the approach of most development teams.