Release Notes - Liferay-Portal-GlassFish

Highlighted Features and Fixes in Liferay-Portal-Glassfish 6.2.0

Features

• Improved mobile device support
• Localization improvments with location-friendly URLs
• Completely new calendar application

Fixes

• New field types for dynamic lists and web forms
• API fixes and clean up
• log4J updated to 1.2.17

The official Release Notes for Liferay-Portal-GlassFish are available here - http://issues.liferay.com/6.2.0/ReleaseNotes. Additional information is available here - http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/release-notes and here - https://issues.liferay.com/secure/StructureBoard.jspa?s=155

Highlighted Features and Fixes in Liferay-Portal-GlassFish 6.1.1

Features

• Evernote added to social bookmarks
• Updated to GlassFish 3.1.2

Fixes

• Visual and messages improvements for page revisions in workflow
• Allow themes to contain compile Java classes
• Fixed XSS - Weather portlet

The official Release Notes for Liferay-Portal-GlassFish are available here - http://issues.liferay.com/6.1.1/ReleaseNotes.

Highlighted Features and Fixes in Liferay-Portal-GlassFish 6.1.0

Features

• Faceted search now integrated with Search Portlet

Fixes

• Fixed Web content feed preview
• Fixed invalid URL warning in Open Social gadget

The official Release Notes for Liferay-Portal-GlassFish are available here - http://issues.liferay.com/6.1.0/ReleaseNotes

Highlighted Features and Fixes in Liferay-GlassFish 6.0.6

Features

• Improvements in iFrame Portlet
• Add JARs to Classpath during JSP precompile
• Ant messages are improved

Fixes

• Fixed file size issue with WebDAV folders
• Fixed web content editor bug

The official Release Notes for Liferay GlassFish are available here - http://issues.liferay.com/6.0.6/ReleaseNotes

How to upgrade

Before upgrading Liferay, it is mandatory that you read and understand the official Liferay documentation related to upgrading the application and your plugins. Failure to fully read and understand this documentation may result in a failed upgrade and possible data loss - http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/user-guide/-/ai/upgrading-liferay-liferay-portal-6-2-user-guide-18-en

The Liferay upgrade installs a brand new version of the software - this is not an incremental update, but a full update. This is why it is imperative that you read the official Liferay documentation to fully understand the upgrade process.

Liferay-Portal-GlassFish is only available on the ISPmanager Control Panel (CentOS 6). If you are on a CentOS 4 (VPS) or CentOS 5 (Webmin) plan and you need the latest version of Liferay-Portal-GlassFish you will need to migrate to a CentOS 6 plan. Please contact eApps Sales for more information.

Before upgrading Liferay-Portal-GlassFish, make a backup of your database. For the ISPmanager Control Panel see the MySQL or PostgreSQL User Guides.

You should also make a backup of your application, your configuration, and any tunings or changes you have made. If you do not have current backups and something goes wrong during the upgrade process, you could have data loss.

When the upgrade completes, you will need to install any plugins you were using in your old version of Liferay. Please note that you cannot reinstall your existing plugins, you will need to find and install versions of those plugins that are designed for Liferay version 6.2. If you have created your own plugins, your developers will have to migrate the codebase in those plugins to be compatible with Liferay version 6.2, and provide you with the .war files.

Liferay-Portal-GlassFish now supports Java SE 7. You can also use Java SE 6 if this is what is supported by your code base.

Pre-upgrade tasks

These instructions assume you are working with a Virtual Machine that was built using the CentOS 6 64bit Liferay-GlassFish (ISPmanager CP) template. If you installed the components for Liferay-Portal-GlassFish individually, these instructions may not exactly match for you. In that case, please refer to the official Liferay upgrade documentation - http://www.liferay.com/documentation/liferay-portal/6.2/user-guide/-/ai/upgrading-liferay-liferay-portal-6-2-user-guide-18-en

Before doing the upgrade, you will need to log in to the GlassFish Admin Console, and make a note of the existing jdbc/LiferayPool JNDI name, and the information about the LiferayMySQL Connection Pool: the database name, database user, database password, URL for the JDBC connection, and URI for the JDBC connection.

To find this information, log in to the GlassFish Admin Console at http://eapps-example.com:4848 (substitute your domain name or IP address for eapps-example.com). The User Name is admin, the password is whatever you set it to when you first installed Liferay-Portal-GlassFish.

Once you are logged in to the GlassFish Admin Console, navigate in the left hand pane to Resources > JDBC and then click on (do not expand) JDBC Resources. This will show you the JNDI Name and the Connection Pool name (both highlighted in yellow here). If you are using the eApps template, the JDNI Name will be jdbc/LiferayPool, and the Connection Pool will be LiferayMySQL. Make sure to copy these names exactly as they appear.

After finding the JNDI Name, expand the link for JDBC Connection Pools, and click on LiferayMySQL. Once you are in this screen, click on Additional Properties at the top of the screen.

This will open the Edit JDBC Connection Pool Properties screen, which has information in the Name and Value columns. Find the following under the Name column, and write down or copy and paste the corresponding values in the Value column.

User
ServerName
Url
DatabaseName
Password
URL

Your Values for User and Password will be different than what is shown here, but the Values for ServerName, Url, DatabaseName, and URL should be the same.

These values are not together in the Connection Pool Properties screen, but they are listed in the order shown. You will need to scroll down the screen to find them all.

Make sure to get these values correctly, because you will need to enter them into the GlassFish Admin Console after you complete the upgrade, so that you can use your existing database information.

You will also need to make a note of the Value for these properties. In your current configuration, they may not exist. If they do not exist, then you will need to set them to the following values after the upgrade is complete.

UseUnicode - should be true
UseFastDateParsing - should be false
CharacterEncoding - should be UTF-8

Once you have recorded the values specified, you can continue on to the upgrade instructions.

ISPmanager (CentOS 6)

To upgrade Liferay-Portal-GlassFish in ISPmanager, you will need to work from the command line using SSH, and you will need to be able to work as the root user. You will need to use yum to upgrade the application, and then copy your existing data directory and portal-ext.properties file into the new version. Once the upgrade is complete, you will also be forced to change your admin password when you first try to access Liferay.

Upgrading Liferay-Portal-GlassFish

Once you are logged in to the VM using SSH, change to the /opt directory, and do the following - yum update liferay-portal-glassfish. This will upgrade the application. Due to the size of the upgrade (over 200 MB), it can take a few minutes for the upgrade to complete.

Once the upgrade is completed, you will see these directories in /opt:

The first directory - liferay-portal-glassfish, is the new version of the application, and the liferay-portal-glassfish-pre-6.2.0-upgrade directory contains all the files from your previous version of Liferay.

After the upgrade is complete, you will need to add back the values you copied from the GlassFish Admin Console in the pre-upgrade tasks. See the section titled Post-upgrade tasks for information on how to do this.

Once you have completed the post-upgrade tasks, you will need to stop the Liferay service, copy your exiting data directory to the new installation, and also copy your existing portal-ext.properties file, replacing the one in the new installation. After that you can restart the Liferay service, and then finish the configuration.

Post-upgrade tasks

Once the upgrade has completed, you will need to immediately log back in to the GlassFish Admin Console, and add the JNDI and JDBC Resources.

Create the Connection Pool

After you log in to the GlassFish Admin Console, navigate to Resources > JDBC and click on but do not expand JDBC Connection Pools.

This opens the JDBC Connection Pools screen, where is where you will add the new Connection Pool. Click on New...

This opens the New JDBC Connection Pool (Step 1 of 2) screen.

• Pool Name - set this to the value you copied in the pre-upgrade tasks, which should be LiferayMySQL (note the case of the letters)

• Resource Type - select javax.sql.ConnectionPoolDataSource from the drop down list

• Database Driver Vendor - select MySql from the drop down list

Once you have set these values, click Next in the upper right hand corner.

This takes you to the New JDBC Connection Pool (Step 2 of 2) screen. Scroll down to the Additional Properties part of the screen. This is where you need to enter in the Values you copied for User, ServerName, Url, DatabaseName, Password, URL, as well as enter in the correct values for UseUnicode (true), UseFastDateParsing (false), and CharacterEncoding (UTF-8).

Remember that the values are not together, and that there are 159 options here. Make sure that you are looking at the correct Name/Value pair. Also be aware that the default settings for URL and Url look very similar to the correct settings, but are not correct. You will need to add in the settings you copied earlier.

Once you have added in the correct values, scroll back to the top of this screen and click on Finish. This will take you back to the JDBC Connection Pools screen, which will now show the new LiferayMySQL Pool.

Create the JNDI

After you create the LiferayMySQL Connection Pool, navigate to Resources > JDBC and click on but do not expand JDBC Resources.

This opens the JDBC Resources screen, which is where you will add the JNDI. Click on New...

This takes you to the New JDBC Resource screen.

• JNDI Name - set this to the value you copied in the pre-upgrade tasks, which should be jdbc/LiferayPool (note the case of the letters).

• Pool Name - select the Connection Pool you just created, LiferayMySQL, from the drop down list

• Status - make sure that Enabled is checked

Once you have made your changes, click OK in the upper right of the screen. This takes you back to the JDBC Resources screen, which shows the new JNDI.

Stop Liferay-Portal-GlassFish and copy the data directory

After you have added the Connection Pool and the JNDI, you will need to stop the Liferay service, and then copy your existing data directory into your new version.

First, stop the Liferay service, with the service liferay-portal-glassfish stop command. This command may take a few seconds to execute.

Change directories into the liferay-portal-glassfish directory, and make a backup of the data/ directory that was created during the update. Then change directories to the liferay-portal-glassfish-pre-6.2.0-upgrade directory, and copy your actual data/ directory into the liferay-portal-glassfish directory.

Note that the cp -R command is used - this does a recursive copy, which copies all the files and directories. For the new data directory, you will need to move it using the mv command.

Once you have copied your existing data directory to the new liferay-portal-glassfish/data directory, you will need to change the owner and group to lportal, using the chown -R lportal:lportal command.

Copy the portal-ext.properties file and change the owner and group

After copying the data directory, you will need to also copy the existing portal-ext.properties file to the new Liferay installation. You will need to use the cp command to copy the file to liferay-portal-glassfish/portal-ext.properties, where it will overwrite the new portal-ext.properties file that was created during the upgrade.

If you are upgrading from Liferay 6.1.0 or greater, your portal-ext.properties file will be located at liferay-portal-glassfish-pre-6.2.0-upgrade/portal-ext.properties

Depending on the width of your browser, the copy command may wrap. The full command is

cp portal-ext.properties ../liferay-portal-glassfish

If you are upgrading from a version of Liferay that is prior to 6.1.0, your existing portal-ext.properties file will be located at liferay-portal-glassfish-pre-6.2.0-upgrade/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/liferay-portal/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties.

Change directories to correct directory, and then copy the file to the correct location.

Depending on the width of your browser, the copy command may wrap. The full command is:

cp portal-ext.properties /opt/liferay-portal-glassfish/

You may also need to change the owner and group of the portal-ext.properties file to lportal once the file is in place, using the chown command.

Restart the Liferay service

Once you have copied the portal-ext.properties file, you can restart Liferay, with the service liferay-portal-glassfish start command.

Be aware that it may take several minutes (possibly up to 10 minutes, depending on the size of your database) before the Liferay service starts. This is because all your data and the database have to be loaded into Liferay, and the final steps of the upgrade have to be processed.

To see the progress, look at the log file in liferay-portal-glassfish/logs. The log files will be named liferay.YYYY-MM-DD.log

To finish the upgrade, see the Liferay Portal post-upgrade configuration section of this User Guide.

Liferay Portal post-upgrade configuration

These screenshots show the default Liferay-Portal-GlassFish configuration. If you have made changes to your theme or settings, your screens may look different. The general steps will be the same, though.

Once the Liferay service is started, go to the Portal in your browser. By default, this is http://eapps-example.com:8080 (substitute your domain name for eapps-example.com, or use your IP address)

The first screen lets you set the name of the Portal, and also the name and e-mail address of the administrative user. You can also see the status of the JDBC connection.

Click on Finish Configuration to continue.

This takes you to the next screen, where you can see that the configuration was successful. It make take several minutes for this screen to appear.

Click on Go to My Portal to continue.

You will need to accept the Terms of Use.

You will also be forced to set a new password.

Once you have entered the new password, click on Save.

You will also need to create a Password Reminder. There are several options to choose from in the drop down menu, or you can create your own question and answer.

Once you have created the Password Reminder, click Save.

This will log you in to the Liferay Portal. This completes the Liferay-Portal-GlassFish upgrade.