ColdFusion applications into J2EE containers

ColdFusion can be deployed to a Tomcat or JBoss kind of web servers

Overview

ColdFusion application server can be of two types, Enterprise and Standard. And it can be deployed in three forms. As a J2EE instance or as a Standalone. In this article we are looking at the steps for deploying it as a J2EE instance AKA like a Java application.

Steps

1. Download Apache Tomcat server.
2. Download ColdFusion Application server from Adobe.com. You can get a developer licensed version but might need an account (free) to download.
3. Start the CF installer and go ahead with steps until it asks you about the configuration. At that point you should select J2EE and then the WAR configuration.
4. The output will be four folders.
   1. CFIDE
   2. cf_scripts
   3. WEB-INF
   4. META-INF (I almost always ignore this one though)
5. Unzip and setup Tomcat. Usually unzipping and running start script from bin folder should bring it up. So make sure it is reachable via the browser window.
6. Stop Tomcat.
7. Open server.xml file from config folder and add this line inside host tag.
   <Context docBase="path/to/docroot" path="contextpath" debug="0" reloadable="true" allowLinking="true">/ </Context>
8. Copy all the CF folders mentioned in above steps (CFIDE, cf_scripts, WEB-INF) into the root of your project folder

                       projectFolder
                           CFIDE
                           cf_scripts
                           WEB-INF
                           ..other folders
                   

9. Start Tomcat and tail the catalina logs to see your ColdFusion starting up.
10. Now you should be able to reach you app via
    <protocol>://<domain>:<port>/<contextpath>
11. ColdFusion Administrator will be at
    <protocol>://<domain>:<port>/<contextpath>/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm