Question

I’d like to ask you for best practices with developing with Liferay SDK.
I have the SDK downloaded, I have Eclipse ready, it works, I can create new portlets and run local Liferay instance to test it.

Here is my situation – all the source code I have is in the Eclipse workspace, currently it is only portlets what I’m working on.

Liferay SDK I have in completely different location than workspace. Let’s say ~/dev/liferay_sdk.
Eclipse workspace is located in ~/workspace.

At the beggining, it was not working like that. Eclipse from some reason can’t find or use Liferay SDK. When I changed “Project validation” in Eclipse/Liferay configuration to “Ignore” the “Liferay Plugin SDK is not valid”, it started to work without problems.

Next problem happend when it comes to need to build a WAR for example.
In the portlet directory in the workspace is present “build.xml” file. But inside it refers to another xml file, which should be located one directory up, and this one refers to more thing in relatively location and so on.

In short, it assumes that you have the portlets etc, inside the Liferay SDK.
Like “~/dev/liferay_sdk/portlets”.

My question is, Am I wrong completely, or could you suggest me the best practices with this?

I don’t want to mix SDK and the code, it sounds wrong to me.

Thanks for help!

Answer 1

I think, the best practice is still when your portlet projects are located inside the Liferay Plugins SDK directory. That way you can take all the advantages of the Liferay IDE plugin for Eclipse, for example. Because as far as I understand Liferay IDE will not allowed you to have portlet projects in another location. It’s pretty easy to import projects to Eclipse from inside the Liferay SDK directory, and that’s not problem.

But I also faced the same sort of problem when tried to save portlet project to the Git repository. Possible solutions with symbolic links didn’t work correctly on every system. Thus I slightly modified the build.xml file to be able to run ant tasks from any directory. For portlets it was something like that:

<project name="your-portlet" basedir="." default="deploy">
    <property file="build.properties" />

    <property name="project.dir" value="${liferay.sdk.home}" />

    <import file="${project.dir}/build-common-plugin.xml" />
</project>

Notice that you should define property “liferay.sdk.home” in build.properties and it should be path to the Liferay Plugins SDK.

As for other types of Liferay plugins (themes, hooks, etc.) you should import another build file for building that type of plugin. For example, for themes it will be:

<import file="${project.dir}/themes/build-common-theme.xml" />

Hope you’ll get the idea. 🙂 But think twice before doing something like that.