Deploy Liferay

Liferay administrator steps

This part describes how to setup a new liferay instance after you went through the initial Liferay setup: create an admin account, confirm the license and terms and fill out your personal details. If you have setup SW360 with vagrant, see https://github.com/siemens/sw360vagrant for the initial admin account.

1. Login as administrator using the just setup password

2. Go to

   Menu Admin -> Item Control Panel -> Section Users, Password Policies -> Default Password Policy -> Actions -> Edit

3. Then

   uncheck Change Required and then save

4. Then we need to grant new users the right to see SW360

   Control Panel -> Configuration -> Users(on the right) -> Default User Associations

   check Apply to Existing Users write in Sites: SW360 save (on the right)

5. Do not allow stranger to create accounts ...

   Control Panel -> Configuration -> Users(on the right) -> Authentication

   uncheck Allow strangers to create ... uncheck Allow strangers to verify ... save (on the right)

6. Then, to deactivate self registration

   Control Panel -> Authentication -> remove checkmarks for creating accounts by strangers save (on the right)

   Note, disabling self registration is required because the current Liferay self registration does not create accounts in the backend service. (hence using the importer is required)

7. Then we go to

   Admin -> Pages

8. and import the lar files from

   frontend/configuration/public_pages.lar
   frontend/configuration/private_pages.lar
   

   for the respective pages, using the tabs Public Pages and Private Pages. Please note that the provided *.lar files are for Liferay 6.2 GA5 only (fun!). If you run a different liferay version, you will need to add the portlets manually until the *.lar files are updated manually.

9. ( DO NOT CHECK Pages -> Change -> Delete Missing Pages)

   We check on first page

   Application Configuration -> Choose Applications (leave all checked)

   Permissions -> Permissions

   Permissions -> Permissions Assigned to Roles

   => Click Continue

10. We check on second page of the import agent:

    Update Data -> Mirror with overwriting

    Authorship of the Content -> Use the Current User as Author

11. If this was successful we can go to

    Private Pages -> users

12. We can then import a csv file that looks like that

     GivenName,Lastname,Email,Department,UserGroup,GID,isMale,PasswdHash
     user last name, user first name, first.last@sw360.org,TOP ORG CODE TEAM,USER,SW360_0004,true,AAAAoAAB9ACem9mZj9zptlEjFSMEF5MdOSUzgyxFDmKDGQDK
    

Note that

1. The GID must be unique
1. The hash here means "t"
1. The GID is called external Id in the thrift-based datamodel

Some notes and troubleshooting

Check Liferay Configuration Options

There are plenty of useful settings to setup for your instance - you should check them depending on your desired use. Just a few examples, you could disable or enable:

• Auto login or self registration functionality
• Site statistics
• Password policies
• Configurability options
• many more, it makes sense to browse the Liferay Admin area (in the optimal case, using the setup-admin login) and check all the options.

Liferay crashes at startup with exception: Dockbar

If the dockbar error occurs, the file named in the error log must be replaced with an original one, because it is corrupted. Note that this represents a bug of the Liferay 6.2 (search in your favorite search engine for dockbar liferay problem ...).

Strange behavior

If the server has problems in terms of long running requests, maybe the memory setting is not allright, consider:

CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m
- -XX:NewSize=512m -XX:MaxNewSize=512m -XX:PermSize=512m
- -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

if you run Java prior to 8.

Surfing to the main page shows blank page with exception message

If the "null pointer page" shows up (just a simple white page saying a null pointer exception occurred), remove the hsql folder inside the data folder from the liferay distro (shutdown before and restart after).