The following instructions provide some of the basic tools necessary to research issues associated with Liferay.

If you start running into an issue within the VLab Collaboration Services (aka "portal"), use the following questions to troubleshoot the issue:

1. Can you reproduce the issue?
2. Does the issue also occur on the development site?
3. Can you reproduce the issue in your own environment (assuming you have one)?
4. Is this a known issue in the VLab's "Virtual Lab Collaboration Services" Redmine?
5. Is this a known bug or issue with Liferay?

To figure out if this is a known issue with Liferay, search its issue repository.

1. Open up a web browser and do a Google search using "site:issues.liferay.com" along with some descriptive text that might help you find the issue, e.g., "Document Library." The more description you put in the search the better.
2. If you find a related issue, look to see if the issue is "Open" or "Closed."
3. Verify that the related issue affects our version of the code: Community Edition (CE) 6.1.1 GA2.
4. If the issue is closed, determine what version of the code the fix was made in. As of the summer of 2013, Liferay is checking in most of their updates in the CE 6.2 branch, but we are running 6.1.1 GA2. That means you need to determine if the fix checked in can be ported back to 6.1.1 GA2. If the fix was only checked into the Enterprise Edition, there is no way for us to look at the code change.
5. If the checked in code is in the CE tree, Liferay's engineers typically reference a Git commit ID (a long hash code, e.g., 77b75a9c98a065b7c717641f42ff21905dd9ad6d). Look for this commit ID within the comments section of the ticket. You will need the commit ID in order to look at the changes.
6. If you have not already done so, make a clone of the Liferay github repositories by using the following commands:
   

   git clone https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal.git
   git clone https://github.com/liferay/liferay-plugins.git
   

7. Locally check out the most recent version of the code using this command:
   

   git checkout BRANCH_NAME_OR_TAG_NAME
   

8. To get the names of the branches, use this command:
   

   git branch
   

9. To get the name of the tags, use this command:
   

   git tag
   

10. Use the following command to search for the files associated with the commit ID determined from issues.liferay.com:
    

    git show --pretty="format:" --name-only COMMIT_ID 
    

11. To see the actual changes, remove the "--name-only" option:
    

    git show --pretty="format:" COMMIT_ID 
    

12. You may need to look at the history of the files that were changed by using the following command:
    

    git log FILENAME
    

13. Document your findings within the VLab Redmine ticket, and work to see if you can port the issue back into 6.1.1 GA2. Depending on the changes, it may mean an update to the VLab theme, hook, or extension environment. Typically the next step is to work within your own environment to roll out the fix and confirm it both works in your area and does not introduce any new bugs. Once this is done we will check the change into our VLab portal repository and roll it out to the development instance.