Liferay

An Ansible role to install and configure Liferay portal.

Requirements & Limitations

This role was tested only on Ansible 1.9.2 but may also work with older versions!

This is a very basic role and while it is capable of provisioning fully functional Liferay cluster, it has some significant limitations (comparing to what one can do configuring Liferay manually)!

Tested only on Linux and most likely will not work on windows (some tasks make use of linux command line utilities)
This role does not install Java. It simply assumes it's already installed.
Currently it uses predefined liferay-ext.properties files and only allows to change particular values in it.
Liferay clustering configuration is currently very limited:
- it uses multicast for discovery
- it uses RMI threads for cache replication (Ehcache Cluster EE plugin not supported)
- it uses replicated Lucene indexes for indexing/search (Solr is not supported)
- document library is fixed to use AdvancedFileSystemStore and only file storage path is configurable
- cluster link feature is always enabled (even if only a single machine is provisioned)

Role Variables

#
# Liferay archive to be installed. If the file in `local` exists it will be used. 
# If it doesn't exists and `url` is provided it will be downloaded
# It's user's responsibility to make sure the right file is downloaded 
# The role assumes the file is "liferay bundle" packaged as ZIP.
#
liferay_archive: {
  local: files/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.2-ce-ga4.zip,
  url: "http://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/files/Liferay%20Portal/6.2.3%20GA4/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.2-ce-ga4-20150416163831865.zip" 
}

#
# The folder on the server whe the Liferay bundle will be unpacked 
#
liferay_unpack_folder: /usr/local

#
# Liferay's home folder. This is should not be changed unless you really know what you are doing! 
#
liferay_home: "{{ liferay_unpack_folder }}/{{ liferay_folder_from_zip.stdout }}"

#
# The operating system user and group that will be used to run Liferay 
#
liferay_os_user: liferay
liferay_os_group: liferay

#
# Liferay's default database 
#
liferay_default_database: {
  driver: "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver",
  url: "jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false",
  user: "liferay",
  pass: liferay
}

#
# Additional databases to be added to Liferay's configuration 
#
liferay_additional_databases: [] 


#
# A folder where files from Liferay's document library will be stored.
# Change this to a shared storage in clustered environment 
#
liferay_dl_folder: "{{ liferay_home }}/data/document_library/"


#
# Network address to autodetect the default outgoing IP address 
# Change this to your database IP:PORT to make sure the right interface is used.
#
liferay_cluster_autodetect: google.com:80

Dependencies

None

Example Playbook

The simplest form

- hosts: servers
  roles:
    - role: milendyankov.liferay

will

download Liferay 6.2 CE GA4 bundled with Tomcat and save it files/liferay-portal-tomcat-6.2-ce-ga4.zip
copy and extract it in /usr/local on the remote server
configure portal-ext.properties to
- disable startup wizard
- use MySQL database called lportal on localhost
- enable cluster link feature

This is probably not what one would want, but it's a reasonable default. To configure working cluster with shared database and file system, something like this can be provided:

- hosts: servers
  roles:
    - role: milendyankov.liferay
      liferay_archive: 
        local: <PATH_TO_STORE_FILE>
        url: "<DOWNLOAD_URL>" 
      liferay_default_database: 
        driver: "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
        url: "jdbc:mysql://<DATABASE_SERVER>/<DATABASE_NAME>?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false"
        user: "<DATABASE_USER>"
        pass: "<DATABASE_PASSWORD>"
      liferay_dl_folder: "/mnt/shared/liferay/document_library/"
      liferay_cluster_autodetect: <DATABASE_SERVER>:<DATABASE_PORT>

If there are more databases Liferay needs to connect to, they can be added like this

- hosts: servers
  roles:
    - role: milendyankov.liferay
      liferay_archive: 
        local: <PATH_TO_STORE_FILE>
        url: "<DOWNLOAD_URL>" 
      liferay_default_database: 
        driver: "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
        url: "jdbc:mysql://<DATABASE_SERVER>/<DATABASE_NAME>?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false"
        user: "<DATABASE_USER>"
        pass: "<DATABASE_PASSWORD>"
      liferay_dl_folder: "/mnt/shared/liferay/document_library/"
      liferay_cluster_autodetect: <DATABASE_SERVER>:<DATABASE_PORT>
      liferay_additional_databases:
        - id: custom1
          driver: "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
          url: "jdbc:mysql://<DATABASE_SERVER>/<DATABASE_NAME>"
          user: "<DATABASE_USER>"
          pass: "<DATABASE_PASSWORD>"
        - id: custom2
          driver: "oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver",
          url: "jdbc:oracle:thin:@//HOSTNAME:PORT/SERVICENAME"
          user: "<DATABASE_USER>"
          pass: "<DATABASE_PASSWORD>"

License