Deploying portal projects

The Deploy Portal wizard allows you to publish your portal project directly to a Portal server from Rational Developer.

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.

Portal Designer deploys portal configurations using XML configuration interface, and optionally deploys files to WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear directory. To 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 importing or publishing portals.

To deploy a portal, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on the portal you want to deploy. From the menu, select Deploy Portal. The Deploy Portal wizard opens.

2. 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.

3. For Deployment Options, choose whether you want to "Deploy portal configuration only" or "Deploy portal configuration and files"; then click Next. Choosing the latter option will allow the wizard to deploy the portal and its theme and skin files.

4. In the Portlet page, choose which portlets you want to deploy by checking the corresponding boxes in the list of portlets. Required portlets for this project will have a greyed out check box next to their name. You cannot remove these from your portal.

5. Choose how you want to be prompted for overwrite, and choose an overwrite method; then click Finish. If you are deploying a portal with 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".

Once you start the deploy process, do not interrupt it. Errors in a project or an unfinished deploy may break a portal server. As such, you should not deploy directly to a production server. Before running deploy, it is recommended that you back up or image your server.

When the deploy wizard finishes, you will see the following message:

To ensure that the portal server uses the string changes correctly in the project, on the server, copy the contents of WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear/wps.war/WEB-INF/classes/nls to Portal_server_install_directory/shared/app/nls. WebSphere_install_directory and Portal_server_install_directory are the installed locations of WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal server, respectively. node is the node name of the 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.

Limitations

• For limitations regarding firewalls and Linux, refer to Configuring networks for deployment.

• If you are using deploy as a method of installing your portal project to a remote 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 WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear directory.

• When you select the "Deploy server configuration and files" option, Portal Designer replaces the files under WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear directory. If the file transfer is interrupted (Example: 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, please take the following action:

  • Fix whatever caused the interruption.

  • Once fixed, deploy the portal project again using the same option.

  • If you can not fix what caused the interruption, export your portal project, then manually deploy it. Refer to Exporting portal projects.

• If JSP files or Java classes within the portal server refer to classes that are in external JAR files, there may be compilation errors after the project is imported. You need to import any external JAR files, which can be located in the WebSphere_install_directory/lib or Portal_server_install_directory/shared/app directories on the external portal server, to your development machine, and add them to Java Build Path of your portal project. To set the Java Build Path,...
  1. From the Project Explorer view, highlight the project and select Properties.

  2. In the left pane, select Java Build Path.

  3. In the right pane, select the Libraries tab.

  4. Add the referenced JAR.

  5. Click OK to save the configuration.

 

Related tasks

Defining servers for importing or publishing portals
Exporting portal projects
Optimizing JSP file testing