Installing Liferay 4.0 with Tomcat 5.5 and MySQL 5

First and foremost I am just a hacker and not really a developer, so this process may work for you but then again it may not!!!

First download the bundled Liferay-Tomcat version from http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/downloads. Simply put, unzip the file, navigate to the bin directory and execute startup.bat. There are instructions for installing this version on the Liferay web site.

Liferay is database agnostic, therefore it shouldn't really care what database you are using.

1. Copy the mysql driver jar file to %/catalina%/common/lib
2. Edit ROOT.xml in %catalina%/conf/catalina/localhost/

substitute this

with this (this is part of the documentation from Liferay, found under the database section, MySQL and Tomcat.)

driverClassName
com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

url
jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8

username
test

password
test

maxActive
20

Make sure to enter the relevant details to connect to your database. Database scripts are available from the Liferay web site.

Restart you application and you should be in business. I have to confess that I got several errors when starting the tomcat again but the portal seemed to work fine. I am not sure what the consequence of the errors is going to be.

If you are really brave the next step would be to install the portal on a current Tomcat installation. Why would you want to do this, if you want to keep all your current applications and if you also want to take advantage of the Tomcat monitor in your system tray to start and stop tomcat.
1. Delete the bin directory from your liferay installation
2. Copy will the remaining folders in your installation to your Tomcat installation.

Like I said, it worked for me but I cannot gaurantee it will work for you.