Welcome to my Liferay Portal FAQ page. I will grow this page organically and try to cover all the usual questions people who are new to the product ask. I'll also have some write-ups on what I regard as difficult topics such as figuring out the config. Please look here if you feel you didn't get an answer to your question. These are 'unofficial' FAQs. If you want to chat and ask a question please go Offical Forum here. and goto the feedback and suggestions where you can interact with the Liferay Portal community.

I'll cover the hurdles that I found and solved once I had unpacked the source code on the Liferay Sourceforge site. This is by no means an attempt to cover all the questions, just the one I found not easily answered as I googled around.

Where are the configuration files?

They are contained within the portal-ext.jar file. You'll need to crack it open with a 'jar -xvf portal-ext.jar command to see what the default setting are. Pay particular attention to the portal.properties file. You'll need to create your own one called portal-ext.properties file. However, it's not obvious what to over-ride, so I have my example to get you started if you're not sure. Don't worry, you don't have to crack open JAR files to configure the application. All you need to do it to create a portal-ext.properties file which over-rides the defaults.

Location for file: liferay-portal-4.2.1/WEB-INF/classes/portal-ext.properties 

portal.release=professional

portal.ctx=/liferay-portal-4.2.1

auto.deploy.dest.dir=../webapps

auto.deploy.deploy.dir=/home3/s/seadarie/liferay/deploydir

##this gets rid of the nasty startup errors

jcr.jackrabbit.repository.root=/home3/s/seadarie/liferay/jackrabbit
lucene.dir=/home3/s/seadarie/liferay/lucene
default.theme.id=classic
default.color.scheme.id=01
log.user.paths=true

##this is only if you want a login portlet not
##to redirect from the page you're on

auth.forward.by.last.path=true

##this speeds up the portal at startup -
##otherwise it can take several minutes
index.on.startup=false

##this is only needed if you're running a non-ROOT war file
##it fixes the broken images on the cms articles
journal.transformer.listener=com.liferay.portlet.journal.util.TokensTransformerL
istener,com.liferay.portlet.journal.util.PropertiesTransformerListener,com.lifer
ay.portlet.journal.util.ContentTransformerListener,com.liferay.portlet.journal.u
til.LocaleTransformerListener

How do I configure the database?

The config for the database is covered in the Tomcat config NOT the portal config. It is a system resource. This was a complete pain in the a** because the install instructions didn't work for me. Maybe I misunderstood. Anyway, here is what I had to do. This works for me. In Tomcat server.xml add 

   <Resource
       name="jdbc/LiferayPool"
       auth="Container"
       type="javax.sql.DataSource"
       driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
       url="jdbc:mysql://morestuffprovidedbyyourserviceprovider"
       username="yourusername"
       password="yourpassword"
       maxActive="100"
       maxIdle="30"
       maxWait="10000"
   />

How do I configure mail?

Mail, like DB access is configured in the Tomcat piece. Namely, in server.xml 

   <Resource
               name="mail/MailSession"
               auth="Container"
               type="javax.mail.Session"
               mail.transport.protocol="smtp"
               mail.smtp.host="mail.kattare.com"
   /≷

How can I control where the user goes on login?

You can configure the portal-ext.properties to tell Liferay not to redirect to the private user pages. See sample config.