For developing/testing/running Wicket-portlets a portal server is necessary. There are some opensource portals in the market: Liferay, Jetspeed, JBoss Portal Server, OpenPortal (Sun Java System Portal Server).
Here we describe the setup of Liferay portal server.

Installation

Windows:

• Unzip file "liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip" to a suitable folder. Do not use a path, which contains spaces! Otherwise you will get runtime errors. So use e.g. "D:\". New folder is then "D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\".

Configuration

Connector Port

If you do not want the portal to run under the port 8080, you have to edit the tomcat configuration file D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\conf\server.xml, e.g. to use 18080 instead:

...
<Server port="*18005*" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">
  ...
  <Connector port="*18080*" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
               connectionTimeout="20000" 
               redirectPort="*18443*" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />
    ...
  <Connector port="*18009*" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="*18443*" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />
  ...
</Server>

Database

If you do want to change the database from the default (in memory) database to e.g. PostgreSQL, you have to create/edit this in the file "...\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\classes\portal-ext.properties":

...
#
# PostgreSQL
#
jdbc.default.driverClassName=org.postgresql.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/pg_liferay
jdbc.default.username=pg_liferay
jdbc.default.password=life1ray2
...

Hint: Copying of JDBC-driver to Liferay is not necessary, it's already there in "...\tomcat-6.0.18\lib\ext\".

Usage

You can start the enclosed Tomcat in the same way as you would if you had downloaded Tomcat separately.
Tomcat is launched by way of a script which is found in its bin subfolder.

Windows:

C:\> D:
D:\> cd "D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin"
D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin>startup.bat
Using CATALINA_BASE:   C:\Program Files\apache-tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME:   C:\Program Files\apache-tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: C:\Program Files\apache-tomcat-6.0.18\temp
Using JRE_HOME:        C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_13

Problem: If the CATALINA_BASE is different from your installation (like in this example), the startup-script found a "CATALINA_HOME" environment variable for another tomcat installation.
Solution: Remove the environment variable or change the startup-script:

...
rem if not "%CATALINA_HOME%" == "" goto gotHome
...

C:\> D:
D:\> cd "D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin"
D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin>startup.bat
Using CATALINA_BASE:   D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME:   D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\temp
Using JRE_HOME:        D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18/jre1.
5.0_17/win

After successful startup you can view the portal pages under: http://localhost:18080/ (depends on your configured port).

Be aware that Liferay is running on an In-Memory-Database unless you do not configure your own database! All changes will get lost.

Login

The default login should be "test@liferay.com / test" (admin handbook), but for some reason they changed it. Now the login is "bruno@7cogs.com / bruno".