Deploying components in WebSphere Application Server

This topic describes how to deploy components, themes, and other plugins in WAS.

WAS does not support the hot deployment of components. However, Liferay's deployment code must update plugins by adding necessary libraries and configuration files. For example, Liferay's portlet deployment code adds the following important piece of configuration to a portlet component's web.xml file: 

<context-param>
  <param-name>com.ibm.websphere.portletcontainer.PortletDeploymentEnabled</param-name>
  <param-value>false</param-value>
</context-param>

This context parameter is important for WAS deployment, as it ensures that WAS's portal server does not attempt to load the new portlet, and instead allows the Discovery Framework to load the newly deployed portlet.

To deploy plugins in WAS:

  1. Make the plugin .war file available to Liferay for "hot-deploy."
  2. Deploy the .war file generated in step 1 as a module in the Discovery Framework enterprise application. There are two ways to do this:
    • Through the Websphere Integrated Solutions Console.
    • At the command line, using wsadmin.
More details on each of these steps appear in the following topics.