Liferay Hosting Options and Tooling
Liferay offers flexible hosting options, from self-hosted environments to fully managed cloud solutions. Your hosting option significantly influences your development workflow. This article introduces each option and briefly addresses their implications for developer use of Liferay workspaces and tooling. You’ll revisit these topics in later modules.
Liferay Self-Hosted
Liferay Self-Hosted provides the Liferay DXP software, while customers are responsible for hosting and maintaining Liferay DXP with their own infrastructure. This includes managing servers, operating systems, databases, and other supporting software. Self-hosting offers the highest level of control and customization but requires more robust server administration and infrastructure management expertise.
Tooling Considerations
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Liferay Workspace: Liferay Workspace is essential for self-hosted projects, providing the structure for organizing code, managing dependencies, and configuring Liferay DXP environments.
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Liferay CLI Tools: Blade CLI offers a comprehensive set of features that can be fully leveraged in a self-hosted environment.
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Liferay IDEs: Liferay IDEs accelerate development by providing tools for coding, debugging, and deploying to self-hosted Liferay instances.
Liferay Cloud Deployments
Liferay offers two cloud deployment options: Liferay PaaS (Platform as a Service) and Liferay SaaS (Software as a Service). Both options provide a managed cloud environment for hosting Liferay DXP and custom extensions. However, they differ in the level of control you have over the platform, which influences how you utilize Liferay's developer tools.
Tooling Considerations
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Liferay Workspace: Liferay PaaS provides customers with a project workspace hosted on GitHub that developers can configure and use to extend Liferay DXP, while for Liferay SaaS, workspaces only serve as development environments for client extensions.
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Liferay CLI Tools: Liferay Cloud CLI provides comprehensive control over Liferay PaaS environments (e.g., service management), while in Liferay SaaS, it can only deploy and manage client extensions.
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Liferay IDEs: Liferay IDEs offer a comprehensive development environment for Liferay PaaS deployments, though they are not applicable to Liferay SaaS.
Local Developer Bundles
Besides the above options, you can run Liferay locally on your machine. This involves setting up a local Liferay bundle with a Tomcat server, providing a lightweight and isolated environment for experimenting with Liferay and building your applications. These bundles offer several advantages, such as faster feedback loops, simplified debugging, and reduced reliance on external resources.
Setting up local bundles relies on Liferay Workspace and is accelerated by Blade CLI and Liferay IDEs.
Conclusion
How you host Liferay DXP significantly influences how you use Liferay workspaces, CLI tools, and IDEs. Next, you’ll review what you’ve learned before moving on to the next module.
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