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Generating Projects with Blade CLI

Blade CLI exists to create, build, and deploy Liferay projects in Liferay Workspaces. Once created, these projects can be imported into an IDE or worked on directly. Here are the various ways in which you can create and manage Liferay projects.

Creating a Liferay Workspace

Liferay Workspace is a set of folders on your machine where you store projects and DevOps configurations. Liferay Workspaces can be imported into any IDE, because they are Gradle projects. See Liferay Workspace for further information. To create a Liferay Workspace follow these steps,

In your CLI, navigate to the folder where you want to create a Liferay Workspace.
Run this command:
```
blade init [workspace name]
```
Blade asks you for a recent Liferay version, such as dxp-2024.q3.7. Choose the version of Liferay you’re developing for by typing the number and hitting enter.

Note

If Blade doesn’t display the version you need, the versions could be cached. Though Blade refreshes this cache every seven days, you can refresh it manually at the CLI:

blade --refresh-releases

Creating a Project

Projects exist in a Liferay Workspace. Here are the important options to remember:

-t: Specify the project template to use. You can get a list of these by typing blade create -l.

-p: Specify the package name for your class.

-c: Specify your class name.

-v: Specify the Liferay version; for example, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, or 7.4. Note: you can omit this option and Blade defaults to the version configured in Workspace.

Putting these together, if you want to create a Liferay MVC Portlet called guestbook, use this command:

blade create -t mvc-portlet -p com.acme.z3x1.portlet -c GuestbookPortlet guestbook

This creates a project using the MVC Portlet template, a default package called com.acme.z3x1.portlet, a portlet class called GuestbookPortlet, for the version of Liferay specified in the workspace, called guestbook. You can now import your Workspace into your IDE. The Liferay IntelliJ plugin or the Eclipse plugins in Liferay Developer Studio provide enhanced support. Note that if you create a new Workspace in your project with Blade, you must refresh your Gradle project in your IDE.

Creating Sample Projects

Liferay maintains a GitHub repository of sample projects. These are fully-implemented samples of various Liferay technologies you can use as a starting point for your projects. Rather than clone the repository to get access to them, however, you can create them locally using Blade CLI.

Find the sample project you want:
```
blade samples
```
Say you want a working example of a model listener. Type this command:
```
blade samples model-listener
```
If you want a specific version of the sample, you can specify a version:
```
blade samples -v 7.1 model-listener
```

Converting Legacy Plugins SDK Projects

If you have Liferay projects before version 7.0, they are in a Plugins SDK. To use them with any version of Liferay beyond 6.2, you must migrate them from the Plugins SDK to a Liferay Workspace.

Make sure the projects in your Plugins SDK are ready to deploy. For example, Service Builder services should already be generated.
Create a Liferay Workspace if you haven’t already.
From within the Liferay Workspace, execute this command:
```
blade convert -s [path to old Plugins SDK] -a
```
This converts all projects in the Plugins SDK to Workspace projects.

If you want to convert only a single project, use this command instead:

blade convert -s [path to old Plugins SDK] [name of Plugins SDK project to convert]

When converting a project containing Service Builder services, Blade CLI creates separate API and service OSGi modules. The portlet remains a WAR and moves into the wars folder.
Themes are converted to leverage NodeJS like Liferay 7.x themes. To convert a Java-based theme, add the -t option, which uses the Theme Builder Gradle plugin instead.