Debug the Liferay plug-in Projects from Eclipse

Debug the Liferay plug-in Projects from Eclipse

In the part 4 of the series will see how to debug the Liferay Portlet from Eclipse. Most of the developers will like to step through the code when the rendering or action happens.

Need some changes in Tomcat and Eclipse to enable debugging. This assumes the project is deployed as an exploded war file as in Part 3.

1. Tomcat Setup, Enable debugging in the Tomcat instance for Liferay.

NOTE: This step is required if you only if you are planning to start Liferay Tomcat from command prompt by running “startup.bat”. If tomcat is started from IDE skip this step.

a. Edit the setenv.bat file at: D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin .Add these lines after set JRE_HOME
set JPDA_ADDRESS=5005
set JPDA_TRANSPORT=dt_socket

b. Edit the startup.bat file and add “jpda” to the last line, the file is located at, D:\liferay-portal-5.2.3\tomcat-6.0.18\bin
Edit the line call "%EXECUTABLE%" start %CMD_LINE_ARGS% , Add jpda to that so that the modified script look like

call "%EXECUTABLE%" jpda start %CMD_LINE_ARGS%

1. b. Modify VM arguments from Eclipse (If Liferay server is started from Eclipse IDE)

Double click on the server created, Click on “Open Configuration”, Select “Arguments” tab,

Add the following line to the “VM Arguments”

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=5005,server=y,suspend=n

2. Eclipse, Configure Debugger

1. Select the menu item Project -> Run->Debug Configurations
2. Click on Remote Java Application and select New
3. Name it like say, Liferay Debugger


4. Browse and pick your Project

5. Set the port to 5005
6. Click on the Source tab and select Add
7. Pick Java Projects and select your source project(s)



8. Click Apply and Debug to start the debugger.
9. From the Eclipse IDE, add break points to the source code.

See Part 1 (Start-Stop Liferay from Eclipse) , Part 2 (Develop Spring MVC Portlet), Part 3 (Deploy to Maven)