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One click deployment to clustered Liferay with Jenkins

published April 27, 2011

During last year, we have built pretty cool one click deployment system with Jenkins. Environment has been created little by little, but when decision was made to cluster Liferay and in addition to serve our 15.000 lines of  JavaScript code from Apache, it was pretty clear that manual installations would be a pain.  So we built environment like this:

Developer can initiate (1) portlet build from the Jenkins CI GUI. Jenkins runs (2) Ant build, unit tests,  selenium tests and builds multiple war packages. If build is successful Jenkins first copies (3) our JavaScript framework to Apache and then deploys (4) portlet wars to clustered liferay environment. All this with one click.

Configuration is pretty simple, each copy step is run as a shell script like so:

./deployFrameworkToApache.sh;
./deployPortletsToNode1.sh;
./deployPortletsToNode2.sh;

I have to give credit to Jenkins, it is really easy to configure.

Samuli @ 19:04 (2 Comments)

tags: Liferay, Software

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Liferay clustering checklist

published April 21, 2011

Yesterday our team finished clustering of our Liferay portal environment. In case I have to do this again, I decided to write a small checklist what should be taken into a consideration when clustering. Official Liferay clustering guide can be found here.

Updated May 6, 2011: added ajp configurations.

Updated May 20, 2011: Check also how Apache AJP protocol works.

1. Ensure that you have same JRE/JDK on both cluster nodes.

2. Check that all Liferay nodes can access your database (or database cluster) and it allows connections from these hosts.

3. Ensure that load balancer can forward requests to both nodes and firewalls won’t block access.

4. Check that all of  cluster nodes are able to send email using your configured SMTP server (e.g. with telnet).

5. Install same version of Liferay to all cluster nodes.

6. If you need session fail over, configure that.

7. Configure tomcat connectors “secure” and “unsecure” to use ajp protocol like so:

<Connector address="xx.xx.xx.xx" port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" ... />
<Connector address="xx.xx.xx.xx" port="8443" protocol="AJP/1.3" ... />


8. Configure properties “net.sf.ehcache.configurationResourceName” and “ehcache.multi.vm.config.location” correctly to portal-ext.properties.

9. Move your Lucene index to database or if that is not possible, to shared NFS mount. In case of shared NFS mount, linux UIDs for Liferay user must be equal in all nodes so that Linux file permissions work correctly.  Liferay user must be able to write to Lucene directory.

10. Move your document library to shared NFS mount or to database. Same rules apply as above.

11. Ensure that your configured Lucene index and document library paths point to correct location in portal-ext.properties.

12. Start your cluster nodes.

13. Check that mod_proxy_ajp module is loaded by apache.

14. Configure Apache  load balancer like so:
Proxy balancers:

<Proxy balancer://liferaycluster>
BalancerMember ajp://node1:8009 route=node1 ping=5 loadfactor=1
BalancerMember ajp://node2:8009 route=node2 ping=5 loadfactor=1
ProxySet stickysession=ROUTEID
</Proxy>


<Proxy balancer://secureliferaycluster>
BalancerMember ajp://node1:8443 route=node1 ping=5 loadfactor=1
BalancerMember ajp://node2:8443 route=node2 ping=5 loadfactor=1
ProxySet stickysession=ROUTEID
</Proxy>


This inside your :80 virtual host:

Header add Set-Cookie "ROUTEID=.%{BALANCER_WORKER_ROUTE}e; path=/" env=BALANCER_ROUTE_CHANGED
ProxyPass /group balancer://secureliferaycluster/group/
ProxyPassReverse /group balancer://secureliferaycluster/group/
ProxyPass / balancer://liferaycluster/
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://liferaycluster/


This inside your :443 virtual host:

ProxyPass /group balancer://secureliferaycluster/group/
ProxyPassReverse /group balancer://secureliferaycluster/group/
ProxyPass / balancer://liferaycluster/
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://liferaycluster/


That’s it!

Samuli @ 20:31 (2 Comments)

tags: Liferay

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