Installing Plugins

Web Space Server comes with two portlets which can handle plugin installation: the Plugin Installer and the Update Manager. The Update Manager helps to determine if you are running the most recent version of a plugin.

You can add the Update Manager portlet to your page by clicking Add Application from the welcome dock. The Update Manager displays which plugins are already installed on the system, what their version numbers are, and whether an update is available.

To install a plugin from the Update Manager, click the Install More Plugins button. It invokes the Plugin Installer portlet, and by default you are on the Portlet Plugins tab. You can install or uninstall the portlets available in the repository. If your server is firewalled, you may not see any plugins in the repository, and you need to install plugins manually. To install plugins manually, clickthe Upload File tab. You can browse the WAR file for a layout template, portlet, or a theme that you want to install. You can specify the deployment context in a text box for easy identification of the portlet. Click the Install button to install the portlet.

If you do not wish to use the Update Manager or Plugin Installer to deploy plugins, you can also deploy them at the operating system level. The first time Web Space Server starts, it creates a hot deploy folder which is by default created inside the home folder of the user who launched Web Space Server. For example, say that on a Linux system, the user lportal was created in order to run Web Space Server. The first time Web Space Server is launched, it will create a folder structure in /home/lportal/webspace to house various configuration and administrative data. One of the folders it creates is called deploy. If you copy a portlet or theme plugin into this folder, Liferay will deploy it and make it available for use just as though you'd installed it via the Update Manager or Plugin Installer. In fact, this is what the Update Manager and Plugin Installer portlets are doing behind the scenes.

You can change the defaults for this directory structure so that it is stored anywhere you like by modifying the appropriate properties in your portal-ext.properties file.