Creating new ColdFusion 8 instances - The easy way
Posted by Marcos Placona at 11:19 AM
5 comments - Categories:
ColdFusion | Adobe | CFML - 101
I just had to write this guide at work, and thought it could be useful to somebody else.
Basically at work, we have ColdFusion 8 installed on each developer's computer, and in order to have everything separated, we have one ColdFusion instance per project, so we can save on resources, and can fine tune each of the instances according to the application needs.
There's a few ways to accomplis this task, but lately I found that the easiest way if to use ColdFusion Admin itself, and let it do all the work for you. here's how I do it, assuming you have ColdFusion 8 multi-server configuration already installed:
- Ensure the Macromedia JRUN Admin Server and Macromedia JRUN CFusion server are running
- Go to 127.0.0.1:8000
- Enter the username and password for the JRUN Admin, lowercase username of admin and the password used to install ColdFusion 8 default is password.
- Once logged in your will see the servers that you already have installed.
- Now check on which port CFUSION is installed. Default is 8300
- You can now access the main ColdFusion server in order to create your new instance. You should be able to login to http://127.0.0.1:your_cfusion_port. In this case 8300, so you can bookmark http://127.0.0.1:8300/cfide/administrator. The login details should be the same as your default JRun admin (admin, password)
- On the left hand menu, click on Enterprise Manager and then Instance Manager.
- You should now see all your servers again, but this time you will click on the “Add New Instance” button.
- Give your server a name, and add a path on the server directory field. ColdFusion will normally put this data automatically, but in this case we will change it to point to where we store our JRun servers (c:\JRunServers). Could be anywhere really. Remember NOT to tick the options “Create Windows Service” and “Auto Restart Service”.
- Go make some tea. It will take a while (10 minutes or so), as ColdFusion is creating all the necessary runtime, and deploying several files to your new server.
- Once it’s finished, you should see a screen like this:
The port will obviously vary, but this screen means your server has been created successfully, and is installed on port xxxx. You should now be able to access this new instance by going to http://127.0.0.1:new_port_here as the service is already up and running.
Andy Allan wrote on 06/12/09 2:05 PM
There are a few little known issues with doing things this way.If you "touch" any of the pages in the "cfusion" instance, e.g. Logging Settings - you don't need to change anything, just hit submit - then the path to the Log files will become hard coded.
What does this mean? It mean that when you create a new instance, your new instance will store it's log files under the "cfusion" instance directory rather than it's own log directory.
You can obviously just log into the new instances Administrator and manually change the paths to what they should be, but folks aren't expecting to do this.
Another little thing, this time in regards checking the "Create Windows Service" box. If you are going to run your new instance with it's own JVM config file, you'll have to remove the service, and recreate using jrunsvc, passing in the path to the config file. This recreates the service, and uses the specific JVM config file too. (it may be able to just modify the existing service, I just don't have a Windows machine near me to check).
Additionally, you do not need the JRun Admin instance running to create new instances via the ColdFusion Enterprise/Instance Manager.