Liferay: how to avoid rebuilding/redeploying CSS files

Question

if you're familiar with Liferay you'll know that when you make an itsy-bitsy change to a css file you shall rebuild the theme and redeploy it.

As for redeploying I made a symlink (mind you I'm on Windows: for the curious creating a symlink on Vista is just a matter of issuing mklink /d dir1 dir2).

But what about rebuilding the stuff with maven? I'd rather skip that step. Basically what it does is combyining and packing all CSS in one everything_packed.css. Is there a sort of config variable to tell liferay just to include the raw files and skip redeployment alltogether?

Thanks

Answer 1

Guys I found the solution myself.

You should have a file called portal-ext.properties file in

$TOMCAT_DIR/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INFO/classes

Or more specifically for my win setup in C:\liferay\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\classes

The file would hold the value

theme.css.fast.load=false

This will prevent liferay to be looking for the everything_packed.css and so you're free to modify your stuff without rebuilding and CTRL-R to refresh the page and see the changes.

Answer 2

Just for completeness, as this question is somewhat old and the problem already solved: There's a lot more along these lines, e.g. javascript, layouts etc. that can be used uncached. This is documented in either the Liferay Wiki (as Developler Mode) or the Development Guide, available from the documentation site (though currently it's not there for the last version - if it's still not there when you're reading it, look for it (PDF) in the older versions.

It's advisable to use these settings only in development, not in production, as putting all css and javascript in as few files as possible results in a huge performance impact.

Answer 3

to include all those settings, just can also just add the following line into your portal-ext.properties file:

include-and-override=portal-developer.properties

this will include all the developer specific settings, and when you want to remove them, you can just comment out this line.

Answer 4

you can edit the css files of your theme from Webapps{your theme}\css

And can see the changes directly.

You can edit almost every file which doesn't require compilation.like .jsp files but not .java files