Liferay: How to configure Liferay Portal

Question

How to configure or to override Liferay portal properties with portal.properties?

Answer 1

Liferay properties is powerful instrument that allows us to configure Portal behaviour without coding of hooks-, ext- and theme-plugin. By new requirement we proof at first for possibility to solve this requirement with change of Liferay configuration. The default properties configuration can be found at Liferay source code: https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/blob/master/portal-impl/src/portal.properties or in https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/blob/master/portal-impl/src/portal.properties or in liferay-bundles\tomcat-7\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\lib\portal-impl.jar

To configure or to override configuration properties of Liferay portal we have to create portal-ext.properties at root folder of Liferay (bundled with tomcat).

Liferay
|-data
|-deploy
|-license
|-logs
|-tomcat-7.xxx
|-portal-ext.propeties        <- override portal properties
|-portal-${user}.propeties    <- override user specific properties

Usual we work in team with version control systems like git or svn, and developers have different configuration like database path etc. Liferay allows to configure user specific configuration in e.g. portal-${user}.properties. Therefor put at first to the portal-ext.properties the inclusion of user properties:

include-and-override = ${default.liferay.home}/portal-${user.name}.properties