Liferay SaaS Go-Live Checklist

Liferay Cloud is committed to your project’s smooth launch. Here is a list of steps you should take to prepare in advance for your production environment to go live.

Inform Liferay Cloud Support

Once you know your production environment’s go-live date, submit a Support ticket at least 8 days before the site’s activation.

Include this information in your ticket:

1. The date you plan to go live.

2. Any custom domains your site(s) must use.

3. Whether you will use a custom SSL certificate. If so, provide the certificate.

Create a DNS Record with Your Chosen Provider

Liferay requires a Canonical Name (CNAME) record for the domain associated with your project (e.g., exampleproject.lxc.liferay.com), using your project ID. Your project ID is provided during provisioning.

You can also find your project ID by navigating to your client extensions environment (e.g., your extprd environment), and copying it from the URL. The project ID is between a random 4-digit code and the dash (“-”):

If your DNS provider does not offer CNAME records for base domains, try using the ALIAS record. If an ALIAS record is also not available, use an A record connected to the appropriate IP address. Then, update the virtual host name in the portal’s site configuration. If you run into problems, notify Support on the ticket you created.

Important

Using a CNAME record is strongly recommended. A records are connected to a specific IP address. This might cause problems for disaster recovery.

Note

Liferay SaaS applies restrictive X-Robots-Tag headers to default *.lxc.liferay.com domains to prevent search engines from indexing pre-production environments.

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, noimageindex

These headers are applied at the infrastructure level and are not controlled by DXP SEO settings such as robots.txt or page SEO configuration.

When you configure a custom production domain (for example, www.acme.com), these headers are not applied and search engines can index the site normally.

Verify DNS Configuration

After configuring your DNS records, verify that your domains correctly point to Liferay infrastructure before going live.

Check Domain Resolution

Open your domain in a browser.

Possible results include:

Result	Meaning
NXDOMAIN or “This site cannot be reached”	The DNS record is missing or has not propagated yet.
SSL warnings such as ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID	DNS is resolving, but the SSL certificate has not yet been provisioned for this domain.
The site loads successfully	DNS and SSL are configured correctly.

Verify DNS Records

Use tools such as dig, nslookup, or public DNS propagation tools such as DNS Checker and WhatsMyDNS to verify your DNS configuration.

dig www.example.com

Verify that the domain resolves to the expected CNAME or IP address.

Verify Virtual Host Configuration

After DNS propagation completes, verify that your site’s virtual host configuration includes the correct custom domains.

Create Custom SSL Certificates (Optional)

If you are creating a custom SSL certificate, keep these considerations in mind:

• The SSL certificate must also contain the intermediate certificates.

• When sending an SSL certificate to Liferay Cloud Support, upload it in a .zip file secured with a password, and share the password in a secure channel. Use the Large File Uploader tool instead of uploading it as a normal attachment.

• To avoid service interruption when your SSL certificate expires, provide Liferay Cloud Support with the new certificate before the last maintenance window before the expiration. You can provide the new certificate on a Support ticket.

Adjust TTL when Transferring Your Domains

When transferring a custom domain to your new site on Liferay SaaS, DNS caching can significantly impact the time for the site to go live.

Avoid long DNS caching times by reducing the Time to Live (TTL) field on your DNS record to a few minutes, at least a few days before you go live. Once your instance goes live, return the TTL to a longer value.

Additional Considerations

This checklist was designed with a typical Liferay SaaS instance in mind. Take special consideration for any of your project’s unique needs, like client extension implementations.