Disable Liferay Personal Sites

Issue

How to disable Liferay personal sites?

Environment

Liferay DXP 7.2
Liferay DXP 7.3

Resolution

This property is enabled as true by default, but in order to disable personal sites add these below properties in portal-ext.properties file.

# Set whether or not public layouts are enabled. 
# If public layouts are not enabled, then the property
# "layout.user.public.layouts.auto.create" is assumed to be false.
# Env: LIFERAY_LAYOUT_PERIOD_USER_PERIOD_PUBLIC_PERIOD_LAYOUTS_PERIOD_ENABLED
#
layout.user.public.layouts.enabled=false
layout.user.private.layouts.enabled=false

And, Liferay automatically creates personal sites on user registration or creation. In order to avoid this, the following properties needs to be added.
```
# Env: LIFERAY_LAYOUT_PERIOD_USER_PERIOD_PRIVATE_PERIOD_LAYOUTS_PERIOD_AUTO_PERIOD_CREATE
layout.user.public.layouts.auto.create=false
layout.user.private.layouts.auto.create=false
```
Note: After adding the above properties, server restart is required so as to bring the properties into effect.

Additional Information

The public and private page sets of personal Sites are handled separately. It's easy to leave one Page Set enabled while disabling the other.
If initially user has enabled personal sites in instance but then disabled them, existing personal Sites remain in instance until the next time users sign in, at which point they’re removed.