Publishing portals

In the Rational Software Delivery Platform, you can choose to either manually or automatically publish a portal from a portal project, including all of its related portlet projects, to a WebSphere Portal server.

Before you publish your portal, you should familiarize yourself with the necessary configuration information for your portal server. For more information, refer to Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.

There are two ways to publish your portal from a portal project to WebSphere Portal:

• Export - This method is recommended for publishing to a staging or production server. You need to manually move the exported portal to a portal server (by portable media or another method). Since exporting from your file system does not require FTP or copy access to the portal server, there is very little chance of interruption during publishing.

• Deploy - This method automatically publishes a portal from a portal project to a portal server. Deploying is recommended for publishing to a test, integration or staging server. (For further restrictions, see the "Publishing across a firewall" section below.)

  If you are also transferring portal artifacts during deployment, have FTP or copy access to the portal server. If the file transfer is interrupted, for example by a network failure, there is a slight chance that the portal server may become inoperable.

You can change the global settings of the portal server within Portal Designer and deploy them to the server; however, you should restart the server after deployment to ensure that the changes take effect.

Depending on which method you use to publish your portal from Rational tools to your portal server, these tasks will help guide you through the process:

• Exporting portal projects
• Deploying portal projects

 

 

Publishing across a firewall

These are some issues that may prevent you from deploying over a firewall:

• If the firewall denies FTP or copy access to the portal server (this is usually the case with production server), you cannot deploy files to the portal server.

• If the firewall is configured to allow FTP, deployment may still fail if you send too many files at one time (i.e. more than 3,000 at a time).

• In the case of deploying associated portlets with your portal, if the firewall denies a request from the Portal server to your workstation (where you run Rational tools), your deployment will fail. For detailed instructions on what to do if your portlets fail to deploy, refer to Deploying portal projects. Scroll to the "Limitations" section at the bottom.

For more information, refer to Network considerations.

 

Importing and deploying portlets with your portal project

If you created your portal project by importing from a WebSphere Portal server, then the server that you deploy to must have all of the portlets associated with the portal project installed before deploying. If not, then the deployment operation will fail. Portlets originating from portlet projects will be deployed when needed.

 

Server access for publishing

Trying to publish more than one portal project to a WebSphere Portal server at the same time will cause conflicts. The portal server cannot detect multiple deployments.

The best practice for publishing a portal project is to make sure that only one user has access to the portal server, and that person has the sole responsibility of publishing.

Limitation: Although the WebSphere Portal installer contains an advanced option to install an empty portal, Portal Designer relies on administration portlets for setting access control; therefore, publishing a portal project to an empty portal is not supported.

• Defining servers for publishing or importing portals
  Use the New Servers wizard, to define a server connection for importing, exporting, and deploying portals.

• Exporting portal projects
  Exporting allows you to manually move all or part of a portal project to a Portal server.

• Deploying portal projects
  The Deploy Portal wizard is the recommended tool for publishing your portal project directly to a portal test, integration, or staging environment from the Rational Software Delivery Platform.

Related tasks

Defining servers for publishing or importing portals
Exporting portal projects
Manually deploying exported portal projects
Deploying portal projects
Optimizing JSP file testing

Related information

Network considerations

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