Liferay : Installing on Tomcat as a non-root webapp context and using MySql

Started playing with liferay. Want to create an intranet application for a group of companies.

Liferay : Quoting from the liferay website,"Liferay Portal is an enterprise web platform for building business solutions that deliver immediate results and long-term value. Get the benefits of packaged applications and an enterprise application framework in a single solution."
Liferay portal includes :

• Content & Document Management 
• Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces 
• Enterprise Collaboration 
• Social Networking and Mashups 
• Enterprise Portals and Identity Management 

Here I am going to share the resource and procedure I followed to setup Liferay community edition locally on my PC. [BTW, I am using windows 7]

Requirements :

• JDK 1.6 [I think you know where you'll get it :) ]
• Tomcat6 
• Liferay 6.0.5 Community Edition WAR bundle 
• Liferay Portal Dependencies 6.0.5
• Two extra libraries to copy at tomcat lib directory jta.jar and mail.jar

Procedures :

1. Unzip Liferay 6.0.5 WAR bundle file and copy all content into %TOMCAT_HOME%/webapps/liferay folder.[certainly you'll need to create the liferay folder within webapp folder :)]
2. Unzip and copy all Liferay Portal dependencies 6.0.5 to %TOMCAT_HOME%/lib/ext [if the ext directory is not there, please do create it]
3. Include the ext in your catalina properties ; update the following line on %TOMCAT_HOME%/conf/catalina.properties : 
   common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar
4. Copy the two libraries (jta.jar and mail.jar) to %TOMCAT_HOME%/lib/ext
5. Create liferay.xml file into %TOMCAT_HOME%/conf/Catalina/localhost folder. It looks like this:
   
   <Context path="/liferay" crossContext="true">
   
   <Resource
   name="jdbc/LiferayPool"
   auth="Container"
   type="javax.sql.DataSource"
   driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
   url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/liferaydb?useUnicode=true&amp;characterEncoding=UTF-8"
   username="root"
   password=""
   maxActive="20"
   />
   
   </Context>
   
   In my case, DB user is “root” with empty password. You must create an empty DB in MySQL, for example “liferaydb”. Please also note the bold text.
6. Create portal-ext.properties into %TOMCAT_HOME%/webapps/liferay/WEB-INF/classses folder. It looks like this:
   
   jdbc.default.jndi.name=jdbc/LiferayPool
   portal.ctx=/liferay
   
   
7. If you are using MySQL as database server instead of HSQL, you must copy mysql jdbc lib into %TOMCAT_HOME%/lib/ext folder.
8. Run startup.bat/sh, you will see in console when liferay creates and populates the portal database automatically. Now, you can open browser window and enter the folow URL http://localhost:8080/liferay. Use test@liferay.com and test as user and password respectively.

Resources :

• Wikipedia
• Liferay website
• Community support