I am working with Liferay 6.0 on JBoss 5.1.1, Windows 8 is the OS. On server startup I always get the following error explaining the auto deploy directory can't be found:
ERROR [AutoDeployDir:90] Directory F:\liferay-portal-ee-6.0\deploy could not be created
This makes sense because I don't have an F: drive. However, I'm unable to configure it in the portal-ext.properties file as explained here. When I log into the Liferay control panel, and look under Portal Administration -> Portal Properties, I can see that the value I put in ext.properties is indeed displayed as the value for auto.deploy.deploy.dir. However, when the server starts up, it is using F:\liferay-portal-ee-6.0\deploy as the auto deploy directory and logging the error above. I have debugged the GlobalStartupAction class which initializes Liferay's auto deploy and I can see that it's calling PrefsPropsUtil.getString(String, String) to retrieve the value for the auto deploy directory and it's passing the value I set in portal-ext.properties as the second argument, according to the PrefsPropsUtil Java doc the second argument is a default value. When I dig down into the PrefsPropsUtil.getString call I can see that it's using an instance of PortalPreferencesLocalServiceImpl to retrieve a list of properties by companyId, ownerId and ownerType which are set to 0, 0 and 1 respectively. Since the PortalPreferencesLocalServiceImpl is "local" I'm assuming it's not going to a different machine to retrieve values. I've done extensive directory and file searching for references to auto.deploy.deploy.dir and values like F:\liferay-portal-ee-6.0 and I'm unable to fine where this property is getting set. Where is this value coming from and why isn't my override being used?
Since you are using Liferay 6.0, go to Control Panel-> Plugins Installation -> Install More Portlets -> Configuration.
In the configuration tab, you may see the Deploy directory set to be F:\liferay-portal-ee-6.0\deploy
This may be because either someone has modified the value from the control panel or you are using database dump from some other existing Liferay installation.