Liferay 6.1 EE comes with SAML 2.0 Identity Provider and Service
Provider support via SAML plugin. If you are not familiar with SAML
check out my Introduction
to SAML presentation slides.
In this post we will configure Liferay…
As part of Liferay 6.1 release we’ve created a new package that has a convenient script to install Liferay artifacts to your local repository or to a remote repository. This package is provide for both CE and EE releases but it is more useful for EE users because we don’t release EE versions of the artifacts to Maven Central repository.
You can download the 6.1 GA1 package from here and 6.1 EE users can download it from Customer Portal. Once you have downloaded the zip file unzip it.
In the root of the package you’ll find build.properties. This file defines the remote repository location, repository id and optional gpg signing key and password. You can override settings in this file similarly to those in plugins sdk by creating a build.USERNAME.properties file and overriding the properties you want. If you are just deploying to you local repository there’s no need to override any settings.
Before you begin you should make sure you have mvn in your path. For remote deployment you should also increase the available memory for maven otherwise you might get a OutOfMemoryError. For windows you can use following in your cmd prompt or set MAVEN_OPTS environment variable.
For Unix-like systems such as Linux and Mac OS X use
To deploy to your local maven repository you can just run:
To deploy to a remote repository such as Sonatype Nexus you need to set credential required to deploy to the repository in ${USER_HOME}/.m2/settings.xml like this:
Then you need to add the repository id and repository location to your build.USERNAME.properties like this:
Notice that the repository id must match the one in your settings.xml so that correct credentials are picked up. You can also set gpg.keyname and gpg.passphrase if you want the artifacts signed. Check out this blog post on how to generate gpg key and distribute the public key.
Now you can deploy it just by running:
Now you have following Liferay artifacts at your disposal. Their groupId is com.liferay.portal and artifactId is one listed below and version is the Liferay release number such as 6.1.0 for 6.1 GA1 and 6.1.10 for 6.1 EE1.
This will be the first in series of posts on how to develop Liferay plugins with Maven. In this post we’ll start by creating a new parent project for your plugins and add a portlet project to it. You need to have your maven environment setup with mav…
This is a new cool feature I worked on with Brian and it’s coming on 6.1 as well as 6.0 EE SP2 and 5.2 EE SP6. With this feature you can add new struts actions to portal from a hook plugin and you can override any existing action with it.
There are two interfaces com.liferay.portal.kernel.struts.StrutsAction and com.liferay.portal.kernel.struts.StrutsPortletAction. The StrutsAction is used for regular struts actions like /c/portal/update_password and StrutsPortletAction is used for those that are used from portlets.
Let’s create a new simple hook to test it out. This hook will create a new struts path /c/portal/sample and wraps an existing struts action. Start by creating a new hook plugin in your plugins SDK. I’ll call it sample-struts-action.
./create.sh sample-struts-actionNext edit the liferay-hook.xml and add following fragment:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE hook PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Hook 6.1.0//EN" "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-hook_6_1_0.dtd">
<hook>
<portal-properties>portal.properties</portal-properties>
<custom-jsp-dir>/META-INF/custom_jsps</custom-jsp-dir>
<struts-action>
<struts-action-path>/portal/sample</struts-action-path>
<struts-action-impl>com.liferay.samplestrutsaction.hook.action.SampleStrutsAction</struts-action-impl>
</struts-action>
<struts-action>
<struts-action-path>/message_boards/view</struts-action-path>
<struts-action-impl>com.liferay.samplestrutsaction.hook.action.SampleStrutsPortletAction</struts-action-impl>
</struts-action>
</hook>Next we need to create the struts action like below:
package com.liferay.samplestrutsaction.hook.action;
import com.liferay.portal.kernel.struts.BaseStrutsAction;
import com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.ParamUtil;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;
/**
* @author Mika Koivisto
*/
public class SampleStrutsAction extends BaseStrutsAction {
public String execute(
HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws Exception {
String name = ParamUtil.get(request, "name", "World");
request.setAttribute("name", name);
return "/portal/sample.jsp";
}
}Next create the second Struts action. This one will actually wrap ViewAction of message boards portlet.
package com.liferay.samplestrutsaction.hook.action;
import com.liferay.portal.kernel.struts.BaseStrutsPortletAction;
import com.liferay.portal.kernel.struts.StrutsPortletAction;
import javax.portlet.ActionRequest;
import javax.portlet.ActionResponse;
import javax.portlet.PortletConfig;
import javax.portlet.RenderRequest;
import javax.portlet.RenderResponse;
import javax.portlet.ResourceRequest;
import javax.portlet.ResourceResponse;
/**
* @author Mika Koivisto
*/
public class SampleStrutsPortletAction extends BaseStrutsPortletAction {
public void processAction(
StrutsPortletAction originalStrutsPortletAction,
PortletConfig portletConfig, ActionRequest actionRequest,
ActionResponse actionResponse)
throws Exception {
originalStrutsPortletAction.processAction(
originalStrutsPortletAction, portletConfig, actionRequest,
actionResponse);
}
public String render(
StrutsPortletAction originalStrutsPortletAction,
PortletConfig portletConfig, RenderRequest renderRequest,
RenderResponse renderResponse)
throws Exception {
System.out.println("Wrapped /message_boards/view action");
return originalStrutsPortletAction.render(
null, portletConfig, renderRequest, renderResponse);
}
public void serveResource(
StrutsPortletAction originalStrutsPortletAction,
PortletConfig portletConfig, ResourceRequest resourceRequest,
ResourceResponse resourceResponse)
throws Exception {
originalStrutsPortletAction.serveResource(
originalStrutsPortletAction, portletConfig, resourceRequest,
resourceResponse);
}
}Then we need to create the JSP in docroot/META-INF/custom_jsps/html/portal/sample.jsp
Hello !
And lastly we need to create portal.properties in docroot/WEB-INF/src
auth.public.paths=/portal/sampleNow we are ready to deploy the plugin and see if it works. Just run ant deploy in your plugins sdk to deploy it.
You should see following in your tomcat console:
22:01:29,635 INFO [AutoDeployDir:167] Processing sample-struts-action-hook-6.1.0.1.war
22:01:29,638 INFO [HookAutoDeployListener:43] Copying web plugin for /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/deploy/sample-struts-action-hook-6.1.0.1.war
Expanding: /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/deploy/sample-struts-action-hook-6.1.0.1.war into /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299
Copying 1 file to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299/WEB-INF/classes
Copying 1 file to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299/WEB-INF/classes
Copying 1 file to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299/WEB-INF
Copying 1 file to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299/META-INF
Copying 12 files to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/sample-struts-action-hook
Copying 1 file to /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/webapps/sample-struts-action-hook
Deleting directory /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/tomcat-6.0.29/temp/20110117220130299
22:01:30,486 INFO [HookAutoDeployListener:49] Hook for /Users/mika/Development/Liferay/git/bundles/deploy/sample-struts-action-hook-6.1.0.1.war copied successfully. Deployment will start in a few seconds.
Jan 17, 2011 10:01:39 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory
INFO: Deploying web application directory sample-struts-action-hook
22:01:39,727 INFO [PluginPackageUtil:1080] Reading plugin package for sample-struts-action-hook
22:01:39,759 INFO [HookHotDeployListener:432] Registering hook for sample-struts-action-hook
22:01:39,770 INFO [HookHotDeployListener:717] Hook for sample-struts-action-hook is available for useNow try to access http://localhost:8080/c/portal/sample. It will ask you to sign in and once you sign in you should see the message Hello World! in your browser. You can add a paramer name to the url to change the message. If you access message boards it will print the message “Wrapped /message_boards/view action” in tomcat console and continue to render message boards as if nothing was changed.
Now our sample was really simple one. The return value from the execute method is the view where the request is dispatched next. This can be path to JSP, an existing struts forward or tiles definition. Returning null means that your action has handled the view already. Now you could try to return for instance portal.terms_of_use to display the terms of use.
You can download this sample plugin from svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/plugins/trunk/hooks/sample-struts-action-hook. The username is guest and password is empty.
UPDATE: We changed the API so that the original action is passed in so that you can also wrap it with your own logic instead of replacing. I also added a new hook property auth.public.paths so it allows you to set new public paths from hooks. I also added a StrutsPortletAction into to the sample and that demonstrates wrapping an existing action.
That’s a question I’ve head many times and in this post I will show you just how to do that. These instructions are for Liferay 6 CE GA3 Tomcat 6.0 bundle however you can use any app server supported by Terracotta but the location and some configuration might be slightly different. So to get started you need to download:
Next step is to install Liferay and Terracotta. For the purposes of this post I won’t go into great detail with the installation as both Terracotta and Liferay has good documentation. Basically the installation consist of unpacking the packages to a directory. From now on I will refer to those locations as LIFERAY_HOME and TERRACOTTA_HOME and inside LIFERAY_HOME we will have tomcat directory which I will refer as TOMCAT_HOME. Normally you would also install Liferay and Terracotta in separate servers but I will post a separate post addressing the recommended architecture. For now we can install everything on the same machine and run Terracotta with default configuration for development purposes.
Normally when clustering Liferay you need to address following components: EhCache and Hibernate, Quartz Scheduler, Document Library, Search Engine and optionally Session Replication. For Document Library and Search Engine Terracotta doesn’t offer anything new so you make those centrally available the same way as before. For example SAN for DL and SOLR for Search and Indexing. So we are left with EhCache and Hibernate, Quartz and Session Replication that we can address with Terracotta.
ehcache.multi.vm.config.location=/my-ehcache/liferay-multi-vm-terracotta.xml net.sf.ehcache.configurationResourceName=/my-ehcache/hibernate-terracotta.xml hibernate.cache.region.factory_class=net.sf.ehcache.hibernate.EhCacheRegionFactory
org.quartz.jobStore.class = org.terracotta.quartz.TerracottaJobStore org.quartz.jobStore.tcConfigUrl = localhost:9510
#org.quartz.jobStore.dataSource=ds #org.quartz.jobStore.isClustered=false #org.quartz.jobStore.misfireThreshold=60000 #org.quartz.jobStore.tablePrefix=QUARTZ_ #org.quartz.jobStore.useProperties=false
This is highly container specific so refer to Terracotta documentation for specific instructions. Following steps are for Tomcat 6.0.
<Valve className="org.terracotta.session.TerracottaTomcat60xSessionValve" tcConfigUrl="localhost:9510"/>
Testing your configuration is simple:
TERRACOTTA_HOME/bin/start-tc-server.sh
TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh
2010-09-01 21:35:40,059 INFO - Terracotta 3.3.0, as of 20100716-140706 (Revision 15922 by cruise@rh5mo0 from 3.3) 2010-09-01 21:35:40,566 INFO - Successfully loaded base configuration from server at 'localhost:9510'.
TERRACOTTA_HOME/bin/dev-console.sh
Now as you can see it is quite easy the cluster Liferay with Terracotta express installation. Now if you want to use the DSO approach it is whole another beast as it involves tedious instrumentation. If you are a Liferay EE customer and want to get supported version of both Liferay and Terracotta contact your Liferay sales rep and ask about Liferay Terracotta Edition.