This is the first of a serie of articles where you can learn how to develope a portal in Liferay.

We are going to install and fix all the necessary settings to work on a Windows XP system.

To install Liferay Portal is needed:

- Java 6 JDK
(http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/widget/jdk6.jsp)

- Mysql Community Server 5.x
(http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/).
You’ll need a database manager (Mysql Administrator or other).

- Liferay Portal 5.2.3 CE bundled with Tomcat 6.0
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip)

- Notepad++
(http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download)

Unzip all the files in your HD. Remember the path in order to the next step.

We need to add a new user variable. Click on “Environment Variables” at “System Properties” section on “My Computer”. Click on “New” and add the variable with this values:

variable name: JAVA_HOME
variable value: C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_20
(you have to put your jdk path here)

Fig. 1. Environment Variable "JAVA_HOME"

Then, edit the system variable “Path” and add the new variable and save all changes.

variable value: %JAVA_HOME%\bin; (don’t delete the other values)

Fig. 2. "JAVA_HOME" added to "Path"

Liferay Portal works with a database called “hsql”. To work with a Mysql database, create a database called “lportal” and a user with all the grants to that database. Then create a file called “portal-ext.properties” on “C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3″. Copy and paste the next code in it:

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=lportal
jdbc.default.password=lportal

Where the words in bold are: database name, username and password.

On “C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\webapps\ROOT” delete the folders “sevencogs-theme” and “sevencogs-hook” (these are sample themes and hooks).

Now we can run Liferay Portal. Go to

C:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin (or wherever your folder is unzipped)

and execute “startup.bat”. After a few minutes, the welcome page will appear on your browser.

Fig. 3. Liferay Portal Home page

To get to the portal administration, sign in as:

username: test@liferay.com
password: test

You can download a pdf version here