Steps for deploying liferay 5.2.3 on oracle glassfish 3.1 , mysql 5 db 1- Download liferay 5.2.3 bundle with whatever app server zip file and extract the liferay-portal.war from it. Don’t download the liferay-portal.war directly from sourceforg.net as it has some bugs. 2- Download liferay 5.2.3 dependencies from sourceforg.net 3- Copy the liferay dependencies into the app server lib folder (glassfish3\glassfish\lib) 4- Also copy the jdbc driver into the same folder ..in my case I used mysql jdbc driver 5- Start mysql and create liferay user as follows create database liferay; grant all on liferay.* to 'liferay'@'localhost' identified by 'liferay' with grant option; grant all on liferay.* to 'liferay'@'localhost.localdomain' identified by 'liferay' with grant option; 6- Create portal-ext.properties file and put the connection params in it. jdbc.default.driver