The Deploy Portal wizard is the recommended tool for publishing your portal project directly to a portal test, integration, or staging environment from Rational® Developer.
Portal Designer deploys portal configurations using an XML configuration interface, and optionally deploys files to WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear directory. To deploy files, you must have read, write, and delete access to this directory via copy or FTP. You can define this access method within the server settings. For more information on defining a server for portal deployment, see Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.
Note: During deployment, all referenced portlets in portlet projects that do not exist on the server will be deployed. You can also update existing portlets from the workspace to the server.
You should not deploy directly to a production server. For information on publishing to a production environment, refer to Exporting portal projects. Before any deployment, you should back up or image your target server.
To deploy a portal project and its referenced portlets, follow these steps:
Once you start the deployment process, do not interrupt it. Errors in a project or an unfinished deployment may corrupt a portal server.
Since the portal project does not have any access control information, use administration portlets in the published Portal site to set appropriate access control.
When the Deploy Portal wizard finishes, you may see the message that is shown below. To suppress this message, specify the Library directory in your server configuration. The Library directory must be specified when you use a WebSphere® Portal v5.1 server; it is optional, but recommended, for WebSphere Portal v5.0. See Defining the Library directory for properties files.
"To ensure string changes in the portal project are correctly used by the remote portal server, copy the contents of <was_home>/installedApps/<node>/wps.ear/wps.war/WEB-INF/classes/nls to <wps_home>/shared/app/nls on the remote system. Alternatively, specify the portal library location in the server configuration for this server, and the properties files will be automatically deployed."In the message shown above, <was_home> and <wps_home> are the installed locations of WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal server, respectively, and node is the node name of the server.
Notes and Limitations
For limitations regarding firewalls and Linux™, refer to Network considerations.
If you are using the Deploy Portal wizard as a tool for publishing your portal project to an external test server, you can set it so that the deployment automatically updates the JSP files on your test server. For more information, refer to Optimizing JSP file testing. You do not have to configure this setting when testing portal projects locally.
Deploying replaces both the label My Portal and all configurations under it, and all theme and skin definitions in the Portal server. When you choose to deploy files in addition to the portal configuration, the deploy operation replaces all files under WebSphere_install_directory/installedApps/node/wps.ear directory.
Unless you have used the Export only themes and skins option, deploying or exporting a portal project replaces all labels and pages under My Portal on the target portal server. Any labels or pages not in the portal project will be deleted from the target portal server.
The workbench does not deploy changes made to the JavaSource/config/language.properties file, which the portal server uses to define its supported languages. If you wish to change the supported languages on your portal server see the WebSphere Portal Product Documentation, under .
When deploying configurations and files, ensure that you have sufficient access rights to the deployment locations defined by the Web applications and Library directories in the server configuration. Read and write permissions are required. See Defining servers for publishing or importing portals.