Upgrading Liferay Bundle

Upgrading a bundle

If you’re running a Liferay bundle, the best way to do the upgrade is to follow the steps below. The new Liferay is installed in a newer version of your bundle runtime. For example, the Liferay/Tomcat bundle for 6.0 used Tomcat 6 by default; the 6.1 bundle uses Tomcat 7. We generally recommend you use the latest version of your runtime bundle, as it will be supported the longest.

1. Obtain the new bundle. Unzip the bundle to an appropriate location on your system.
2. Copy your portal-ext.properties file and your data folder to the new bundle.
3. Review your portal-ext.properties file as described above. Make sure you’re using permissions algorithm 6. If you were using the Image Gallery, make the necessary modifications so your files are migrated to Documents and Media. Review the new defaults and decide whether you want to use them. Review any other modifications you’ve made.
4. Start your application server. Watch the console as Liferay starts: it upgrades the database automatically.
5. When the upgrade completes, install any plugins you were using in your old version of Liferay. Make sure you use the versions of those plugins that are designed for Liferay 6.1. If you have your own plugins, your development team will need to migrate the code in these ahead of time and provide .war files for you.
6. Browse around in your new installation and verify everything is working. Have your QA team test everything. If all looks good, you can delete the old application server with the old release of Liferay in it from the bundle directory. You have a backup of it anyway, right?

As you can see, upgrading a bundle is generally pretty simple. But not everybody can use bundles: sometimes, specific application servers or application server versions are mandated by the environment you’re in or by management. For this reason, Liferay also ships as an installable .war file that can be used on any supported application server.

(Liferay developer document)