Failing to Move / Migrate a Liferay Portal to other Server

Question

Is there an up-to-date, complete guide on moving a Liferay Portal ? How am I supposed to migrate a Portal to another Server in an efficient and safe way ?

I've been developing a Portal, connecting to a mySQL database. Then, I had to move both the portal and database to another Server.

So I did the following steps, pretty identical to this guide

1. export the mySQL Db and import it in the new Server. The data are moved correctly, as I've checked them manually
2. Copy a new (clean) copy of the Liferay Portal to the new server
3. copy the data folder
4. copy portal-ext.properties, then edit the db url and login credentials
5. Copy the portal-setup-wizard.properties, then change the 'liferay.home' param to the correct portal path

I run the server and my admin has the default 'test' password instead of the one I used before the migration then I see that Can't have access to the previous content, like Users, UserGroups, Pages, etc. I Also tried re-indexing the database entries (Users and Organizations, Web Content etc). Again nothing

I also Tried copying the whole Portal, and only changing the .properties files to target the new database and portal path. Again the same problems, no Content from the old portal. It's like I started a fresh portal

So what did I do wrong this time ?

Used Liferay 6.1.0 ce ga1

Answer 1

I failed migrating the portal and had to create it from scratch. Almost 1 year later, i found out what caused the problem. Here it is. To be fair, it's a MySQL issue, not Liferay

The MySql database, since it got ported from a windows server to a Linux one, was exported with table names in Uppercase. When Liferay tries to connect to the database, it will not find the Liferay Model's tables, and will create new ones. Practically Liferay treats the Database as an empty one, and it starts as a fresh portal. I only found that, while exploring the database sometime later, and found out I had each Liferay Table both in uppercase and lowercase.

More info and solutions can be found here