How to install Liferay

First download the community version with tomcat server from the liferay websiteor Click Here
Unzip the contents to a suitable location.
Open the bin directory


And click on the startup.bat file to start and shutdown.bat file to shutdown.

To change the server standard time.

Open the setenv.bat in an editor and change the –Duser.timezone 
-Duser.timezone=Asia/Calcutta
Restart the Server .



For Database Settings 

log into the MySql command line editor. 

mysql> create database `lportal` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

 create a portal-ext.properties file in \liferay-portal-6.0.6 

Add the following Lines to connect to MySql Database. 

#
# MySQL
#
jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEn
coding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=root
jdbc.default.password=root

save and restart.

Check installation success in MySql 

mysql>use lportal ;
mysql>show tables ; A total of 185 rows indicating 185 tables must be shown.  

There is another way  to connect Tomcat to the database. Here is how it is done. Assuming that lportal schema is available in MySQL.

goto this path ${TOMCAT_HOME}\conf\Catalina\localhost
Open the root.xml and add the following lines in it.

<Context path="" crossContext="true">

<Resource
name="jdbc/LiferayPool"
auth="Container"
type="javax.sql.DataSource"
driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/lportal?useUnicode=true&amp;amp;characterEncoding=UTF-8"
username="root"
password="root"
maxActive="20"
/>
</Context>

while configuring your database do make sure the corresponding jar file of the database is present in the lib directory of tomcat. Liferay Bundled wit tomcat has mysql.jar in it by default in the lib/ext folder.
More Liferay 6.0.5 Properties.

Now ,some fine tuning must be done if you are going to start development in liferay , so that everything runs faster and smoother , without much of ui customization.

Here is what you've got to do.

Open setenv.bat again , and add the following lines to it
-Dexternal-properties=portal-developer.properties 

Thats it, You are done and now you can start development on Liferay !!!