Liferay Upgrade Planner

Upgrade your running 6.2 to its latest GA / service pack before jumping to 7.0. Starting from a fully patched baseline avoids known migration bugs and gives the upgrade tool a clean schema.

Catalog all hook, ext, theme, layout, and portlet plugins. Each maps to a different OSGi extension point in 7.x, so this list becomes your migration backlog. Anything not on the list will silently stop working.

The Ant-based Plugins SDK is gone. Recreate your projects in a Liferay Workspace and build with Gradle/Blade. Use Blade CLI to scaffold modules and to convert existing plugins where possible.

blade init my-workspace
cd my-workspace
blade convert -s my-old-plugin

Hook and Ext plugins no longer exist. Each customization becomes an OSGi component at a specific extension point — ServiceWrapper, ModelListener, DynamicInclude, MVCActionCommand, OSGi Configuration, etc. Map each one before writing code.

Velocity (.vm) theme templates are deprecated; 7.x themes use FreeMarker (.ftl) with a new Node/Gulp build. Port portal_normal.vm and friends to .ftl and adopt the new theme structure.

The monolithic portal-service API was split into hundreds of app modules. Many com.liferay.portal.kernel.* classes moved to their owning module APIs. Expect to fix imports across the whole codebase and declare the new module dependencies.

*LocalServiceUtil facades still exist for compatibility, but in OSGi modules you should inject services with @Reference. Regenerate Service Builder code against 7.0 and review service.xml for changes.

Schema and data are migrated by the standalone Liferay Upgrade tool (portal-tools-db-upgrade-client). Configure it against a backup of your 6.2 database, run it, then start the portal and let module upgrade processes finish.

# Edit portal-upgrade-database.properties, then:
./db_upgrade.sh

After the DB tool runs, individual modules register their own upgrade processes. Check and execute any pending ones from the Gogo shell.

telnet localhost 11311
g! upgrade:list
g! upgrade:execute <module>

Search moves to Elasticsearch. After the data upgrade, reindex every index from Control Panel → Search or via Gogo so content becomes searchable again.

Embedded Lucene is replaced by Elasticsearch. The embedded ES mode is for development only; production requires a separate Elasticsearch cluster configured via the OSGi search connector settings.

Liferay 7.0 requires JDK 8 and a current app server (e.g. Tomcat 8). Update your runtime and JVM before deploying.

More configuration is exposed as typed OSGi configuration in System Settings / Instance Settings. Review portal-ext.properties for keys that are now managed in the UI or via .config files.

The Lexicon/Clay component set is the standard for 7.1 UI. AlloyUI is on the way out — start migrating custom widgets toward Clay markup and tags.

Compile your modules against 7.1 and address deprecation warnings now; several 7.0-deprecated methods are removed in later releases.

Take a database backup, deploy 7.1, and let the automatic upgrade processes run (or trigger pending ones from Gogo with upgrade:execute). Verify completion before going live.

g! upgrade:list
g! upgrade:execute all