Publishing portals
Overview
From Rational Developer, you can choose to publish your portal project to a WebSphere Portal server either manually or automatically.
Before you publish your portal project, you should familiarize yourself with the necessary configuration information for your Portal server.
There are two ways to publish your portal project to WebSphere Portal:
Export - This method is recommended for publishing to a staging or production server. You need to manually move the packaged portal project to the portal server (by portable media or another method). Since exporting does not require FTP nor copy access to portal server, there is very little chance of interruption during publishing.
Deploy - This method automatically publishes a configuration 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 the theme and skin files during the deploy, have FTP or copy access to the portal server. If a transfer interruption (i.e. network failure) occurs during deployment, there is a slight chance that the portal server will 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 want to use to install your portal project to your Portal server, these tasks will help guide you through the process:
Publishing across a firewall
These are some issues that may prevent you from deploying over a firewall:
- If the firewall denies FTP/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, deploying files may still fail over firewall because deployment sends more than 3,000 files.
- In the case of deploying portlets with a portal project, if the firewall denies a request from the Portal server to your workstation (where you run RAD), 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 Configuring networks for deployment and Exporting portal projects.
Importing and deploying portlets with your portal project
If you created your portal project by importing from a Portal server, then the server that you are deploying to must have all of the portlets used in the portal project installed before deploying. If not, then the deploy 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 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 is has the sole responsibility of publishing.
Related tasks
Creating portal projects
Testing, debugging, or profiling portals