Deploying portal projects
Use the Deploy Portal wizard to publish portal projects directly to a portal test, integration, or staging environment from the Rational Software Delivery Platform.
Rational Software Delivery Platform deploys portal configurations using an XML configuration interface, and optionally deploys files to...
WebSphere_install_directory/profiles/installedApps/node/wps.earTo deploy files, have read, write, and delete access to this directory via copy or FTP. You can define this access method within the server settings.
For more information on defining a server for portal deployment, see Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.
During deployment, all referenced portlets in portlet projects that do not exist on the server will be deployed. You can also update existing portlets from the workspace to the server.
You should not deploy directly to a production server. For information on publishing to a production environment, refer to Exporting portal projects. Before any deployment, you should back up or image your target server.
To deploy a portal project and its referenced portlets, follow these steps:
- Right-click on the portal you want to deploy. From the menu, select Deploy Portal. The Deploy Portal wizard opens.
- In the Select Server window, choose the portal project and portal server that you want to use. If no servers appear in the portal server dialogue box, click New to define a server.
- Choose whether you want to Deploy portal configuration only or Deploy portal configuration and files. Choosing the latter option allows the wizard to deploy the portal and its theme and skin files.
- If you want to select which portlets are deployed, click Next.
If you want to deploy the portal and all of its required portlet projects, click Finish.
- On the Portlet page, choose which portlets you want to deploy by selecting the corresponding check boxes in the list of portlets. You can also choose whether to enable the WSRP producer flag on the portlet. Portlets that are required for this project are selected by default. You cannot remove these from your portal.
- Choose how you want to handle overwriting of existing files. If you are deploying a portal that contains portlets, it is best to choose Update because it will maintain the portlet's existing settings. If you want to clear all of the existing portlet settings on the server, choose Remove & Deploy. If you do not have any portlets available to deploy, these options will be disabled.
- Click Finish.
Once you start the deployment process, do not interrupt it. Errors in a project or an unfinished deployment may corrupt a portal server.
Since the portal project does not have any access control information, use administration portlets in the published Portal site to set appropriate access control.
When the Deploy Portal wizard finishes, you may see the message that is shown below. To suppress this message, specify the Library directory in your server configuration.
"To ensure string changes in the portal project are correctly used by the remote portal server, copy the contents of<was_home>/installedApps/<node>/wps.ear/wps.war/WEB-INF/classes/nls...to...
<wps_home>/shared/app/nls...on the remote system. Alternatively, specify the portal library location in the server configuration for this server, and the properties files will be automatically deployed."
In the message shown above, <was_home> and <wps_home> are the installed locations of WebSphere® Application Server and WebSphere Portal Server, respectively, and node is the node name of the server. Also, for WebSphere Portal Servers, the directory path is
<profiles>/wp_profile/installedApps/<node>/wps
Notes and Limitations
For limitations regarding firewalls and Linux®, refer to Network considerations.
If you are using the Deploy Portal wizard as a tool for publishing your portal project to an external test server, you can set it so that the deployment automatically updates the JSP files on your test server.
For more information, refer to Optimizing JSP file testing. You do not have to configure this setting when testing portal projects locally.
- Deploying replaces both the label My Portal and all configurations under it, and all theme and skin definitions in the Portal server. When you choose to deploy files in addition to the portal configuration, the deploy operation replaces all files under
<profile>/installedApps/node/wps.ear- Unless you have used the Export only themes and skins option, deploying or exporting a portal project replaces all labels and pages under My Portal on the target portal server. Any labels or pages not in the portal project will be deleted from the target portal server.
- When you select the Deploy server configuration and files option, Portal Designer replaces the files under
- WebSphere Portal 6.0:
<profile>/installedApps/node/wps.earIf the file transfer is interrupted (for example, by a network error), there may be files missing from the portal server. In the worst case, you will only see a blank screen from the portal server. To recover from missing files or a blank screen situation:
- Fix whatever caused the interruption.
- Once fixed, deploy the portal project again using the same option.
- If you cannot fix what caused the interruption, export your portal project, then manually deploy it. Refer to Exporting portal projects.
When deploying configurations and files, ensure that you have sufficient access rights to the deployment locations defined by the Web applications and Library directories in the server configuration. Read and write permissions are required. See Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.
Related tasks
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