How to make Liferay Deployment automation

[anil kottam, modificado hace 9 años.]

Hi All,

In our environment we have been using Linux environment for all test & Production systems. The following are the things currently configured :

OS - Ubuntu - 12.04
JDK - 1.7
Ant - 1.7.1
SVN - for version control

We have developed several portlets (nearlly 70) , themes, layouts, hooks. After setting up basic liferay instance it is taking nearly 8 hours to build our environment from scratch. We consider it is taking much time for this setup.

So please could any one share any thoughts so that we can reduce the whole deployment process.
we are looking in to some automation tools like Puppet & chef but we think they are useful to install packages and other resources.

[Oliver Bayer, modificado hace 9 años.]

Hi Anil,

you're right. 8 hours seems to be quite "a bit" to long . What scripts are you exactly calling which run that long? Next question: why do you have to build the complete environment in your test and production server? Normally you would only like to deploy your hooks, themes etc. So why build all from scratch? Did you remove the openJDK in advance? How much RAM did you set for the jvm?

Regards Oli

[anil kottam, modificado hace 9 años.]

Hi Oliver,

Thanks for your quick reply. We are not building our environment currently from scratch, if we get new clients we have to build our Customized portal from scratch for both test and Production including Clusters so we we would like to automate the deployment process. currently.

We have assigned 6gb heap space for JVM with physical RAM 16 gb in Production environments. Our regular deployment process involves checking the code from Our SVN Repository for Plugins ( portlets,hooks,themes,layouts etc) and deploying using ANT.

for instance for a plugin the following commands we run

svn update
ant build-service and
ant deploy.

So we are looking for a way so that we can automate this process.

[David H Nebinger, modificado hace 9 años.]

I'm with Oliver here, I think you're doing way too much...

Why not just clone the environment and customize it per client?

[anil kottam, modificado hace 9 años.]

Hi David,

Thanks for the quick reply. As of now we are not using any virtual environments for our both Production & test environments so we cannot clone the copy from one to another.
We are in phase to move our environments to Cloud soon.
So Could you please give us suggestions for the following things :

What is the process of deployment of Liferay on the cloud like AWS. we heard that there is no need to copy the source code in the cloud instances.
What is the process followed by Liferay for deployment - i mean what tools do you use for deployments.

[David H Nebinger, modificado hace 9 años.]

Cloning applies to hard drives as much as it does a virtual environment.

Clonezilla is an excellent example. You set up your hardware once, then create the HD ghost from it. For every new client you can stand up new physical servers (since that's what you seem to be using) and create them from the ghost copies.

Then log in and reconfigure...

Would sure beat the long cycle you are following now...

[anil kottam, modificado hace 9 años.]

Thanks David for the reply. I would certainly work on it.

[NAGA SAKETH JALIGAMA, modificado hace 8 años.]

Hi,

I work as a junior devops engineer in my company.
-> We have a application that completely runs on liferay and its a very common application for all our schools.
->whenever liferay new release comes into the market, we try to install the whole bundle on our DEV, then modified accordingly and use that tar to deploy on QA/UAT/PROD, but we again change few things like ports, schemas in the conf files in tomcat folders as per environment. So, we are really facing difficluty with this as we do this whole stuff manually. So, i want help in 2 things
a)i want to do the deployments fast, easy and accurate no matter what tool i use.
b)if a new release of liferay come to the market, the upgrade deployment or creating the environment should be fast,easy and accurate no matter what tool we use.

stack:
puppet: our sysops team uses puppet foreman to manage and monitor our unix servers and they use to check DNS/AD stuff liek that.
is there anyway i can use puppet to solve my problem? if yes how?
bamboo: we use bamboo for CI and deployment process. We just create a plan to deploy the war or jar files which is nothing but bamboo runs a small copy script or a restart replace kind of scripts.
docker: we don't use docker but docker has plugins for bamboo and puppet i suppose so anyway we can use docker to solve our problem?

Please reply

[Ritesh Patel, modificado hace 8 años.]

Automating deployment of Liferay has been a common challenge we have heard from our customers and we have helped solve that problem using Docker containers and Nirmata (a SaaS to deploy and manage containerized applications). This solution enables self-service deployment of Liferay on any cloud, public or private. Check out this post for more details:
http://nirmata.com/2016/04/flexible-deployment-of-liferay-using-docker-and-nirmata-container-services/

Disclaimer: I am a founder at Nirmata

[David H Nebinger, modificado hace 8 años.]

Docker is cool and all, but it's important to point out that it can be challenging to performance tune Liferay running within a docker container. It is always important to understand that Docker is not some magical panacea, it takes some knowledge and experience with docker to get things tuned and working correctly, especially if you're considering a production deployment scenario.

[Jack Bakker, modificado hace 9 años.]

anil kottam:

automate the deployment process

1 multiple dev
2 one? staging
3 one+ prod

there is need from 1 to 2 to 3 and also periodically 3 to 2 for content and also periodically 3 to 1 for content

with 1 on Windows, OSX, and Linux and 2 on Linux or Windows and 3 on Linux or Windows... things get wierdly to develop approaches and scripts to automate across platforms and across hosts wherever they might be including to 1 dev enviros

aside from 'wierdly', not sure what I have to offer here...