How to enable Developer Mode in WebSphere Portal
If you work as an application developer, you might want to start/stop your server frequently according to your needs within your project. But starting and stopping is a very time consuming thing in Portal as we all know. For this reason IBM implements a developer mode for Portal, which reduces the time for starting and stopping to a minimum. In our testing environment (VMWare Workstation, 8 GB Ram and a ssd) starting of Portal needs up to eight minutes.
After we enabled the developer mode, starting time could be reduced to just two minutes which means just a quarter of the time we needed before.
To enable developer mode you must first ensure that the server has been stopped.To be sure, switch to the bin subdirectory of your portalserver profile (eg c:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_portal\bin). Issue the command
serverStatus -all (on Windows)./serverStatus.sh -all (on Linux)
If your asked for adminstrators credentials, enter them.
If the server does not run, just switch to your portal profiles ConfigEngine subdirectory (eg c:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\ConfigEngine).Now execute the command
(on Windows)
ConfigEngine.bat enable-develop-mode-startup-performance
(on Linux)
./ConfigEngine.sh enable-develop-mode-startup-performance
This task will run for a minute or two. Look for the "Build succesfull" message to be sure that developer mode has been enabled.
That's it. This will safe you a lot of time.
Developer mode will disable a couple of applications on portal. If you have the need to enhance the list of disabled applications edit the properties-file
wp.base_TargetMapExclList.properties
which is located in the <profile_root>\PortalServer\config\StartupPerformance subdirectory.
To disable developer mode just use the same instrutions as before and enter
ConfigEngine.bat disable-develop-mode-startup-performance (on Windows)
./ConfigEngine.sh disable-develop-mode-startup-performance (on Linux)
Enjoy!