Migrating to Liferay DXP 7.4: A Complete Strategy for Enterprise Upgrades

Enterprise portals running on legacy Liferay editions face growing challenges. Outdated portal servers lag under modern traffic loads, security patches become difficult to maintain, and marketing teams struggle with rigid page template structures. Upgrading to Liferay DXP 7.4 addresses these challenges, offering low-code objects, improved page builders, and cloud-ready architectures.

Step 1: Code Audit and Modularization Plan

The first phase of a Liferay upgrade is auditing customizations. Older versions (like Liferay 6.2) relied on monolithic hooks and ext plugins. In DXP 7.4, customizations are modular OSGi bundles. Engineers must refactor legacy code to use MVC portlets and OSGi services.

Step 2: Database Schema Migration

Liferay provides database upgrade tools to step tables through database schema shifts. We recommend executing dry-run migrations in sandbox staging environments. This helps identify custom metadata or index conflicts before performing the production database transfer.

Step 3: Deploying on Liferay Experience Cloud (LXC)

Liferay DXP 7.4 is optimized for containerized environments. Deploying on Liferay Experience Cloud (LXC) or managed Kubernetes clusters ensures auto-scaling capabilities, automated security patch deployments, and simplified infrastructure monitoring.

• Audit all hooks and custom plugins in the source setup.
• Convert Java Struts actions to clean OSGi portlet services.
• Execute dry-run migrations on staging databases to verify schemas.
• Deploy on containerized Kubernetes or LXC setups for dynamic scaling.