Blog of Dave

This is the third part in a series of posts on setting up ColdFusion, OpenBlueDragon, and Railo all on the same machine using Apache webserver to listen for all requests and direct traffic.  Part 2 can be found here.  You will find links to all parts of this series at the bottom under "Related Content"

With that said, this part in the series focuses on installing ColdFusion and configuring the webserver adapter in such a way that only specific Virtual Hosts will be set up to pass requests to the ColdFusion server. First we want to start by creating a localhost site that is specific to ColdFusion 8 in Apache.  I tend to keep all my sites under /www which is actually symlinked to a 'www' in my home directory. I find a few benefits in this.  First, I usually keep my home partition in shape and carry it around with me from distro to distro, so I always have my sites in tact with me.  Secondly since it is a symlink to my home and not in a system folder I don't need special permissions to write in it.  I will be following along this path, but if you keep your sites elsewhere, then you can adjust as necessary.

Now, we will want to create an Apache virtual host definition for this site.  To do so, create a new configuration file like this: Paste the the following, then save and close. Now we need to make sure that file is included when Apache starts, so run the following command which will make a symlink to the sites-enabled directory. As you can see from the localhost.cf8 configuration file, we are expecting our ServerName to be localhost.cf8, so we now need to add that entry to our hosts file.   Append "localhost.cf8" (with no quotes!) to the line that begins with 127.0.0.1.  Save the file and close. At this point you should be able to restart Apache and hit that empty site in your browser like this: Now that we have a site ready, it is time for us to install ColdFusion.  Once you have downloaded the .bin installation file from Adobe, browse to that directory in a terminal window.  You may need to chmod the file to be executable, then launch it like this: 

$ chmod +x coldfusion-801-lin.bin
 sudo ./coldfusion-801-lin.bin

Choose 1 for English.  After the welcome screen, hit enter to continue.  Next type "Y" and hit enter to agree to the terms and conditions. We are now faced with the installation type prompt. For this example of setting up a development environment, we will choose option 3 "Developer Edition" For our purposes we are going to choose the "Server configuration" option.  However, it should be noted that you could quite easily choole the J2EE WAR file option and install into Tomcat as we did with OpenBlueDragon in Part 2 of thise series. Since we are installing from scratch, we will choose "No" (2) on the next option which is asking if there is an existing version of ColdFusion 8 installed on this machine. For this installation we do not want any of the extra options to install such as Documentation, LiveCycle, Search Services, nor do we want to start on system init since this is on my laptop and I may not always want ColdFusion to start at boot.  So we will uncheck all options like you see in this image and continue. We are going to accept the default installation path of /opt/coldfusion8 Again, since this is a fresh installation, we are going to say "No" (2) to the prompt asking if there are earlier versions of ColdFusion on this computer. Now we start to work our way into the webserver configuration which will tie ColdFusion into Apache.  To start, choose "Add Web Server Configuration" (1) when prompted, then choose "Apache" (1).  In the following prompt asking for the Apache directory that contains your http.conf file, enter /etc/apache2 as you see in the picture below: For the location of the Apache program binary file, enter /usr/sbin/apache2.  For the Start/Stop script, enter /etc/init.d/apache2.  You will see both of these choices here: We now return to the first webserver configuration menu and this time choose "Continue with installation" (4). Then we will need to enter the location of the webroot.  We are going to enter the directory of our new site /www/localhost.cf8 that we created above as you can see in the picture below.  We will also be asked which user we would like ColdFusion to run as.  I typically like to use my own user account for this so I don't end up with permissions issues where I have difficulty accessing files generated by ColdFusion Now enter your admin password, and if you choose to user RDS, enter the  password for it as well. It will now show you the general options you have selected and you will hit enter to start the actual installation.  Once it completes and prompts you to "Press Enter to exit the installer", do so and then start the server with this: During this stage you should see messages that it is configuring the webserver successfully, assuming we entered everything properly above.  Once you are returned to a prompt, it is time to go customize the Apache connector stuff just a bit.  open the httpd.conf file like this: In that you will find the connector stuff that ColdFusion added starting with a line: #JRun Settings. Before we take the next steps, let me explain a bit what we are going to do.  We are going to seperate this into two pieces: the module loader, and the actual connector declaration.  As it stands right now, and request coming through the webserver would be handled by ColdFusion and we don't really want that.  To make it more granular, we are going to create an include file that can be added to any site that will add the connector only to that particular site.  With that said, let's walk through it.   *Cut* (not copy!) these two lines of that connector info: Now we are going to paste those into a new file that will go in our mods-available directory.  Click on the "New" button in gedit and paste that text in.  Now save that file as  /etc/apache2/mods-available/cf8.load. Now *cut* (not copy!) the remainder of the connector out that looks like this: Create a new file named /etc/apache2/cf8connector. Pasted that text in and save the file. Lastly, you may not have this issue, but I found that the DirectoryIndex attribute of Apache was not adding index.cfm to the list of default files. Due to this I actually added it to my httpd.conf. After all of the steps above, my httpd.conf file only has a single line: Now... it is time to do just a little more Apache config and we are ready to go!  Rember that cf8.load mod file we created earlier?  Let's turn that on: Now, let's to add an include call to our localhost.cf8 virtual host configuration.  Open up /etc/apache2/sites-available/localhost.cf8 and add the "Include c8connector" line that you see below: Once you have saved that file, it is time to restart Apache and test out all of our hard work! Now, using your browser, go to http://localhost.cf8/CFIDE/administrator/ and you will see the following: Now... if you are following along from earlier in this series, you should now be able to successfully connect to OpenBD at http://localhost.bd and ColdFusion 8 at http://localhost.cf8 On the next part of this series, we will bring Railo into the mix and finally have all three running on our system.

Next - Part 4 Installing Railo under Tomcat with Apache webserver

Somehow I totally missed this entry when Aaron posted it until he mentioned it on the Mach-II email list today. He has written a really nice and very detailed blog entry on how to configure your application to use SES URLs with by using mod_rewrite in Apache, and then goes on to show how the flow continues to his Mach-II application. We took some similar approaches with the URLs you see here on InstantSpot.

For those wondering how all these pieces fit togther, I strongly recommend you check out his blog entry entitled: Using Apache's mod_rewrite: SES URL's and More.