Liferay Installation Checklist

I wanted to share a checklist to follow after Liferay installation to minimize portal start up failures

1>Check your JAVA_HOME variable .It`s good to use JRE available in JDK bundle
Check for compatibility of JRE required for portal version being used

2>Check LIFERAY_HOME variable This folder is one folder higher than the location of the application server itself

3>Check database connection setting & verify database JDBC driver .jar

4>Check consistency of Liferay portal bundle and dependency jars .
corrupt or incompletely downloaded jars create issues hard to investigate

4b>Check consistency of The portal-ext.properties File verify changes made as per your environment

5>Check for folder permissions (mostly this issue come in Linux/UNIX or other open source OS)

Troubleshooting
a>If server does not start check for setenv.bat
{tomcat-home}/bin/setenv.bat and point JRE_HOME to folder where you installed Java. You setenv.bat haas following entries :
set "JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jre6"
set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dfile.encoding=UTF8 -Duser.timezone=GMT -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

b>Check for database availability
c> Cheksum jar /portal library