Patching Tool Separate Command

Please Note: The patching tool separate command is only available for Patching tool 2.x versions (Patching Liferay Portal and DXP until 7.2).

The Patching Tool’s separate command helps reduce the patched Liferay DXP installation size. If the installation has been patched, you can make it smaller by moving the restore files out of it. The separate command is also used to create Slim Bundles.

patching-tool separate [separation_name]

This command produces a liferay-patching-files-[separation-name].zip file in the Patching Tool’s patches folder. It contains the necessary files and metadata for patching, verification, and validation. Once you create this file, the patch files are removed from their default location and are now only available in this file. You can store this file elsewhere to reduce your installation’s size.

WARNING: If the product is separated from its patches in this way, you cannot run most of the Patching Tool commands until the patches are restored.

After the separation process only the following commands can be used:

auto-discovery
info
setup

Any other command returns this:

This installation does not include data for patching. Please copy the
liferay-patching-files-[separation-name].zip file into the 'patches' 
directory and run patching-tool setup.

Restoring the Separated Patch Files

When you need to patch Liferay DXP again, you must restore the separated patch artifact. To do this, copy the liferay-patching-files-[separation-name].zip back to the Patching Tool’s patches folder and run patching-tool setup command.

The command finds the necessary patching artifact and restores the patch files to the installation. After that, the Patching Tool works like it did prior to separating the patches.