The ext environment supports most of the application servers supported by Liferay Portal. The open source ones are supported by using the bundle that is automatically downloaded from sourceforge, for the proprietary ones it contains the basic configuration needed to make them work using an standard distribution.

The default configuration installs all the application servers in the /ext/servers subdirectory. This can be changed for any application server by setting a custom location in the file app.server.${user.name}.properties. You can also set the path to the Sourceforge mirror that you want to use for downloads or set it to point to a local mirror if you want to avoid external connections for each of the developers. For example to choose an european mirror and install tomcat outside of the ext environment you could use the following configuration:

app.server.type=tomcat
app.server.tomcat.dir=D:/Java/tomcat-5.5.17
sourceforge.mirror=http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lportal

Once you are ready follow the following instructions specific for each application server:

It is possible install several application servers in the ext environment. Just make sure to set the value of the app.server.type property in app.server.${user.name}.properties to the application server that you are using in any specific moment of time.