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Saturday, October 11, 2014

Liferay: Instance Specific 'portal.properties' File

To start with this topic, we need to refresh the following:

Portal-ext.properties
Everybody who works with Liferay, know about portal-ext.properties file. Just to refresh, this file contains key-value pairs of settings and is present in the classpath to override the properties of portal.properties file (can be seen in Liferay source code or portal-impl.jar).

Liferay Portal Instance
Liferay Portal allows you to run more than one portal instance on a single server (e.g. tomcat instance). The Portal Instances page of the control panel lets you manage these instances. All portal data, however, is kept in the same database. (You can read in details here)

As a standard practice, the settings we do in portal-ext.properties file are shared among all portal instances. But with the settings we are now going to discuss will allow us to create different property files for each portal instance, and this is out of box only. To do so, we have to do the following two settings:

1. There are two ways of doing this, first you can set the following property in your system.properties file

or you can set this in your setenv.bat or setenv.sh as per your environment. You can enter the above entry just after '-Duser.timezone=IST' in the file.

2. Now we have to create properties file with the naming format 'portal-<<WebId>>.properties'. For instance, if the web id of the instance is 'finance', then the name of the property file for this instance will be portal-finance.properties.

Similarly we can create different property files for other portal instances. The default web id of liferay instance is 'liferay', so the name of property file for this instance will be 'portal-liferay.properties'.

Important things to note here is - not all properties can be overridden by this setting. Properties such as database configurations should be in the property file of default instance only.

For testing this, you can try to modify the authentication method. Change the value to screen name in the second instance's properties file while keeping the email (as default come bundled), you will get the second instance authenticating with screen name while the first with email address. It also works well while fetching the values using PropsUtil API.