Installing and Activating Liferay CMS

Liferay CMS 2026.Q4+

Liferay CMS ships as both a Tomcat bundle and a Docker image. Both support Liferay Self-Hosted and Cloud Native Experience deployments. Liferay CMS isn’t available as a WAR file or for application servers other than Tomcat. Before anyone can sign in, you must activate Liferay CMS with an activation key.

Installing the Tomcat Bundle

The Tomcat bundle requires a supported Java version, the same one as the Liferay DXP release of the same version.

Download the Tomcat bundle from https://releases.liferay.com/cms.

The archive is liferay-cms-standalone-tomcat-[version].7z. It’s also available as a .zip or .tar.gz file.
Extract the archive. Its top folder, liferay-cms, is the Liferay Home folder.
From inside Liferay Home, start Tomcat.
```
./tomcat-[version]/bin/catalina.sh run
```
This command prints the console output in your terminal. If you start Tomcat with startup.sh instead, the console output goes to tomcat-[version]/logs/catalina.out.

On startup, the console shows the product name and version, for example Liferay Content Management System 2026.Q4.0.

Running the Docker Image

The Liferay CMS Docker image is liferay/cms on Docker Hub. Image tags name the version, for example liferay/cms:2026.q4.0-cms.

Create a folder on your host for the files you provide to the container. Inside it, create a deploy folder for the activation key.
```
mkdir -p [host folder]/deploy
```
Run the image. Publish port 8080, and bind mount your host folder to the container’s /mnt/liferay folder. Use the host folder’s absolute path, because Docker treats a bare folder name as a named volume.
```
docker run -it --name liferay-cms -p 8080:8080 -v [host folder]:/mnt/liferay liferay/cms:2026.q4.0-cms
```
On startup, the console shows the product name and version, as it does for the Tomcat bundle.

For other ways to provide files, see Providing Files to the Container.

Activating Liferay CMS

Liferay CMS requires a Liferay CMS activation key, which is an .xml file. Liferay CMS and Liferay DXP use separate activation keys, so a key for one doesn’t activate the other.

For a trial key, contact Liferay Sales.

To activate Liferay CMS, follow these steps:

When startup finishes, open your instance’s URL, such as http://localhost:8080, in a browser. Until you deploy a valid key, every page redirects to the license activation page at /c/portal/license_activation.
Deploy the activation key’s .xml file.
- Tomcat Bundle: Copy the file into the deploy folder in Liferay Home.
- Docker Container: Copy the file to /opt/liferay/deploy in the container, or to the host folder bind mounted to /mnt/liferay/deploy. With the bind mount from Running the Docker Image, that host folder is [host folder]/deploy.
For example, this command copies a key into the liferay-cms container:
```
docker cp [activation key file] liferay-cms:/opt/liferay/deploy
```
Check the console for a message that ends in license validation passed. The message begins with the product name in your key.

If the console logs DXP Enterprise license validation failed with the cause This product does not support the "DXP Enterprise" portal license, the key is for another product. Deploy a Liferay CMS key instead.
Open your instance’s URL again. The Sign In page appears instead of the activation page. To sign in, see Getting Started with Liferay CMS.