NWS

Team,

I have been working with liferay's patching tool to pull in changes from liferay and get them deployed in my local instance and also on the shared development instance.  Here are some notes on how to use the patching tool.

1. Download the latest patching tool through Liferay's Customer Portal (accessible through liferay.com after signing in).  Click on the "Patching Tool" for the product and then download the latest Patching Tool (Patching Tool 17 right now).
2. Expand the patching tool zip file within your Liferay home directory (e.g., bundles/ liferay-portal-6.2-ee-sp8):
   cd ..../bundles/liferay-portal-6.2-ee-sp8; jar -xvf patching-tool-17.zip
3. Shutdown your liferay instance (e.g., tomcat)
4. Download any patches from liferay's customer portal
5. Place the patches (zip files) into the $LIFERAY_HOME/patching-tool/patches directory -- DO NOT unzip or unjar them.
6. If you are running the tool on an instance where Liferay is running on a non-root context (e.g., /innovate) you will need to update the default.properties file found in /$LIFERAY_HOME/patching-tool
   
   war.path=../tomcat-7.0.42/webapps/innovate/ 
7. See what the patching tool will do by running:
   cd $LIFERAY_HOME/patching-tool/
./patching-tool.sh info
8. To run the patching tool run
   cd $LIFERAY_HOME/patching-tool/
./patching-tool.sh install
9. For help with the tool run:
   cd $LIFERAY_HOME/patching-tool/
./patching-tool.sh help

Be aware that all patches should be kept in the patches directory.  In other words after you install patches don't move then out of the directory if you need to install more.  It seems to need the files.