Andrew's ramblings

Installing ColdFusion 8 on ColdFusion 9 Multi Server instance with IIS Connection

Tags: ColdFusion 8, Coldfusion, ColdFusion 9

I wanted to quickly talk about a problem I ran into with installing ColdFusion 8, as a new instance running under ColdFusion 9 as the underlying application install and using the JRun connector to connect this to an IIS website.

Before I go and discuss that I want to quickly explain ColdFusion 9 and running it as a Multi Server, as there seems to be a lot of people who aren't aware that there is many ways to install this.

One of these ways as described by most is perhaps the best way to install it, however I disagree with that for the simple reason it is going to depend on your situation and what you want to achieve. This is to install and use ColdFusion 9 to deploy another instance of itself, and then use that as your development instance. This is because the settings are apparently transferred between the 2 instances if you do it this way. I think this is very good if you want have each instance with the same settings, and not worry about having to migrate them yourself.

The downside to this is the amount of memory that is being used up as well, one has to remember that each instance will have its own memory pool. So if you only had the one ColdFusion 9 instance you would actually see two JRun applications running, one for JRun itself and one for ColdFusion 9, so it is important to keep that in mind when you decide how you want to set up the environment you are going to be working in.

And then there is the way that I choose to do it, which is to use the same ear to deploy another instance. I have to manually setup each settings for each instance, but that is no big deal because while in development the settings are going to be different depending on my needs for the job at hand.

Now this brings me to the reason for this Blog Post in the first place, in which I had a need to run a site under ColdFusion 8.

So after deploying the instance everything works fine. But the one thing that I had major problems with, only because it was not intuitive to say the least, was setting up the connectors to point to an IIS website with all the mappings for virtual directories and URL rewriting.

When confronted with the screen you will see something like what is in the image shown, and if you are like me you are not going to select the option to configure for ColdFusion 9 applications, after all we are trying to setup ColdFusion 8. This is why it is not very intuitive, because if you don't select this option it will not setup any of the handlers that IIS needs to get this to work. I sometimes found that the default document might not get set here as well, so if you find that this is the case you just will need to add that to the IIS settings. One other thing to note here too as this is important, is that when we deploy a new instance and connect it to IIS, is that the error messages will not be transferred across to IIS from ColdFusion either. To get around this we need to go into the ColdFusion Administrator, and select the option to enable HTTP status codes.

Once you have done that then you will be able to see the error messages from ColdFusion in your browser, once I worked out that the configure option was indeed worded wrong. It was smooth sailing from here, but to figure that out was a lot of trial an error along the way.

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