Liferay Portal's configuration is held in two files:
portal.properties and
system.properties. After installing the portal both
files can be found in:
Professional edition:
WAR-FILE/WEB-INF/classes
Enterprise edition:
EAR-FILE/portal-ejb
The location of the WAR or EAR files will depend on the application
server. Check its documentation if you cannot find them. It is not
recommented to directly modify portal.properties and
system.properties. Instead create two files named
portal-ext.properties and
system-ext.properties.and write in only the
properties whose values you want to override. These two files can be
placed with the original one or in the global classpath of the application
server.
It is recommended to review and adjust the values of the following properties (shown with their default values at the time of writting):
auto.deploy.deploy.dir=${user.home}/liferay/deploy: necessary to enable autodeploy
lucene.dir=${user.home}/liferay/lucene/: necessary for search to work
jcr.jackrabbit.repository.root=${user.home}/liferay/jackrabbit: necessary for the document library
For more information about this files and the configuration possibilities provided by Liferay, read the Liferay Portal 4 - Customization Guide.