Applicable Plans - All Cloud Hosting Plans

Liferay Portal with Tomcat

Overview

This User Guide is written specifically for a CentOS 7 64bit Liferay Portal with Tomcat (no Control Panel) template. This template comes with all the individual components for Liferay using MySQL already configured as a bundle.

If you only need to install Tomcat, you can either choose one of the Tomcat templates when you create your Virtual Server, or you can install Tomcat from the Control Panel after the Virtual Server has been created.

If you have made a mistake and installed the wrong template or applications, please contact eApps Support for assistance.

You will also need to make sure that you have enough memory available for Liferay. For a small Liferay deployment, start with 2048 MB (2.0 GB) of RAM, and be prepared to scale upwards as necessary.

eApps support for Liferay is limited to the installation of the application. Liferay is an enterprise application aimed at large corporations and organizations who have in-house or contract Java developers. If you need support or assistance with customizing Liferay or portlets, please see the Liferay Resources section of this user guide.

Prerequisites

Liferay Configuration Options
    Changing the Liferay Portal Admin User

Using mod_jk or mod_proxy_ajp to bypass Apache
    mod_jk
    mod_proxy_ajp

    Liferay Resources

Prerequisites

You will need a Virtual Server created using a CentOS 7 64bit Liferay Portal with Tomcat (no Control Panel) template. Our template comes with mod_jk installed and preconfigured to pass requests from Apache to Liferay.

If you need to do any customization to Liferay, you will need root access to the Virtual Server via the command line. See the SSH User Guide for more information if necessary.

Liferay Configuration Options

The CentOS 7 64bit Liferay Portal with Tomcat (no Control Panel) template installs all the components needed to run the Liferay portal, including the MySQL database and database user and password. However, you will want to change the Admin user for the Liferay portal for security reasons.

Changing the Liferay Portal Admin User

The Liferay Portal comes with a default admin user and password. You will need to add a new Admin user, and remove the existing one.

You can access your Liferay portal at http://eapps-example.com:8080 (make sure to substitute your domain for eapps-example.com). You will be presented with the Basic Configuration wizard. You can leave the default values or substitute your own.

Once the setup is complete you will be presented with the path to the configuration file.

NOTE: The database connection is preconfigured with a random password. You can find the database credentials in the file /opt/liferay-portal-tomcat/portal-ext.properties

You will now need to log in to the server via SSH and restart Liferay Portal Tomcat using the following command:

systemctl restart liferay-portal-tomcat

You can now head back to http://eapps-example.com:8080 (make sure to substitute your domain for eapps-example.com) and log in using the email address you filled in previously and the default admin password :

• username - test@liferay.com
• password - test

Accept the Liferay Terms of Use by clicking the blue I Agree button.

You will immediately be prompted to choose a new password.

You will also be required to set up a security question in order to recover lost passwords.

Once logged in, click the Menu icon on the top left hand corner.

Expand Control Panel > Users and click on Users and Organization. Click the blue + sign to add a user.

In the Add User screen, enter the details for the new user. Click on Save when complete.

After you click Save, the User Information screen expands to show more options.

Click on Password, and set a password for this user. You can choose to force the user to set a new password upon first logging in.

Next, click on Roles. Click Select on top of the Inherited Regular Roles heading.

In the Roles screen, select Administrator.

This adds the Administrator role to the newly created user. Click on Save.

Log out as the default user (click your username on the left hand menu and click Sign Out), and log back in as your newly created user. You will be asked to set a password reminder before you can complete the login process.

Once you have logged in as the new Admin user, go back to the Menu icon on the top left hand corner. Expand Control Panel > Users and click on Users and Organizations. Click the checkbox to the left of the default Admin user  and then click on the Deactivate trash icon on the top right hand corner. This removes the default Admin user.

Using mod_jk or mod_proxy_ajp to bypass Apache

The mod_jk package comes preinstalled with the template.  You can create an Apache virtual host for the Liferay portal and all requests will be forwared to mod_jk automatically. The configuration file is loated at /etc/httpd/conf.d/mod_jk.conf and comes with the following default directives:

mod_proxy_ajp

The mod_proxy_ajp module is already included with Apache as well. For mod_proxy_ajp add these directives to your VirtualHost block:

More information about mod_jk and mod_proxy_ajp can be found in the Tomcat with Apache User Guide

Liferay Resources

If you need assistance using Liferay, you will need to consult the Liferay documentation, or one of the books available that cover Liferay in more depth.

Liferay has a large community of developers who are actively working on the product. The main page for the community is here - Liferay Community - Dashboard, and the Start Here page has resources for getting up to speed with Liferay.

There are also active developer forums about the different components of Liferay at the Liferay Forums. Blogs by Liferay developers can be found at Liferay Blogs and there are Liferay User Groups around the world.