Liferay portal can be deployed to many app servers. Cool thing is that from version 6 there are ant targets for downloading and preparing app server of your choice.

(1) Download and prepare app server

Invoke in portals folder:

ant -f build-dist.xml unzip-xxx

where xxx stands for name of your server, e.g.: tomcat, geronimo, jetty.... For full list of available unzipping targets, invoke:

a -f build-dist.xml -p


Server will be downloaded and unpacked to ../bundles folder.

2) Enable app server in build environment

Create/edit file app.server.<user_name>.properties (replace user-name with your os profile name). Note that this file is not under version control. Specify the app server name by setting the app.server.type property, e.g.:

app.server.type=tomcat

Take a peek in app.server.properties file (and do not modify it!) for possible server values. They should be the same as in previous step.

3) Deploy

Now when the build enviroment is set, invoking ant deploy and ant all will work with your app server.