Configuring Liferay Workspace

Warning

Liferay Workspace is simple to use, and you can learn the basics by starting at the beginning. If you’re happily creating projects, deploying code, or using a Docker container, you may not need the information here. If, however, you want to do a deep dive and learn about all the things Workspace can do, this is the place for you.

Here are the topics covered:

• Updating Liferay Workspace and Bundled Plugins
• Using Development, UAT, and production environments
• Managing the Target Platform

Updating Liferay Workspace and Bundled Plugins

Liferay Workspace is constantly updated to help developers be more productive, and bringing your Workspace up to date is a painless process.

1. Go to Workspace’s releases on Liferay’s repository. The versions appear in a list; take note of the version number you need.

2. Open the settings.gradle file in your Workspace’s root folder.

3. In the dependencies block, update the version with the version you found in the repository. If you want to stay on the latest release, supply the text latest.release instead of the version number.

    dependencies {
        classpath group: "com.liferay", name: "com.liferay.gradle.plugins.workspace", version: "[WORKSPACE_VERSION]"
    }
   

4. Save and close the file. To run the upgrade, execute any Gradle command, such as tasks:

   ./gradlew tasks
   

Congratulations! Your Workspace is now upgraded.

Updating Your Liferay Version

You may want to update the version of Liferay that Workspace compiles for. This is handled by a single property:

liferay.workspace.product=portal-7.4-ga120

Update the property’s value to the version of Liferay for which you’re developing code. Your workspace’s dependencies are then automatically updated to the new version.

Using JDKs 11, 17, or 21

As of Liferay DXP 2024.Q2+/Portal 7.4 GA120+, Liferay supports JDK 17 and 21. JDK 8 is out of support, and JDK 11 is deprecated.

Note

If you compile under a JDK, you must run under that same JDK. Make sure your app servers are running under the new JDK before making any changes to Workspace. Note that Liferay’s Docker images still use JDK 8 by default and have not been updated with JDK 17 or 21. Create your Docker image using the -e JAVA_VERSION=zulu11 environment variable to use a supported JDK.

Prerequisite: If you’re using an older version of Workspace, you must upgrade two things:

1. Update Gradle to version 8.5
2. Update your Workspace version to at least 10.1.0 (see above for upgrade procedure).

To upgrade Gradle, edit the gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties file in your Workspace:

distributionBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-8.5-all.zip
zipStoreBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists

If you upgraded your Workspace too, make sure you have the liferay.workspace.product property set. Remember, you can always get a current list for this property using Blade CLI by typing blade init -l.

If you upgraded an older workspace, make sure the Liferay CDN is declared in your Workspace’s settings.gradle file:

maven {
	url "http://repository.liferay.com/nexus/content/groups/public"
}

Great! You’re now ready to use JDKs newer than Java 8 with your Liferay projects. If you have existing projects, there are additional steps you must take.

Service Builder Projects

If you upgraded an older Workspace with Service Builder projects, add this configuration to the build.gradle file in the Service Builder -service module:

tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {

	// Generated classes using Jodd library are unable to be read when compiled against JDK 11

	sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
	targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
}

JAX-WS Projects

If you have any JAX-WS projects, they require classes from javax.xml.soap which were removed from JDK 11. Now you must specify them as a dependency manually:

compile 'com.sun.xml.ws:jaxws-ri:2.3.2'

Managing the Target Platform

Normally when defining Gradle dependencies, you must provide versions of those dependencies, like this:

dependencies {
   compileOnly group: "javax.portlet", name: "portlet-api", version: "3.0.1"
   compileOnly group: "javax.servlet", name: "javax.servlet-api", version: "4.0.1"
}

Since any application written on Liferay’s platform targets that platform, Liferay has made it easy for you to specify all dependencies in one shot by declaring the version of Liferay and then inheriting other dependencies from Liferay. That way, you don’t have the mess shown above.

Target platform is enabled by default; there’s nothing extra to do to use it. Here’s what most dependencies look like now:

dependencies {
	compileOnly group: "com.liferay.portal", name: "release.portal.api"
}

This brings in all the dependencies that come with Liferay. If for some reason you must specify a particular dependency, you still can:

dependencies {
        compileOnly group: "com.liferay.portal", name: "release.portal.api"
        cssBuilder group: "com.liferay", name: "com.liferay.css.builder", version: "3.0.2"
}