ColdFusion 8 and Apache on Windows XP

July 22, 2008

A quick and painless guide to setting up ColdFusion 8, Apache and MySQL on a Windows XP workstation.

Download ColdFusion 8.0.1
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=coldfusion

Download XAMPP
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Install XAMPP

Destination Folder: c:\xampp\
You can choose to install Apache as a service if you want (I didn't, but you can add it later).
Once installation completes fire up XAMPP Control Panel and stop Apache if it is running

Install Coldfusion 8.0.1

Tick the "developer edition" option
Choose the "Server configuration" option
Select the subcomponents you want to install. You don't need any of them to run ColdFusion code, so unless you want them I'd untick them.
Destination Folder: c:\Coldfusion8\

When you get to the "Configure web server connector for ColdFusion" screen, click the "add" button.
Select "Apache" from the dropdown list
Enter "C:\xampp\apache\conf" as your Configuration Directory
Enter "C:\xampp\apache\bin\apache.exe" as your server binary path
Click "OK"
Click "Next"
Change the directory for the Administrator Location to: "C:\xampp\htdocs"

The rest is pretty straight forward. You can turn RDS on if you want to use CFEclipse or Dreamweaver to connect to your database for code generatation, otherwise you can leave it off.

Once ColdFusion has finished installing, you need to start Apache.  If you closed the XAMPP Control Panel you can find it in your start menu.

Fire up a browser and enter "http://127.0.0.1/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm" into you address bar. Hopefully you should see a nice ColdFusion admin screen!

MySQL

XAMPP also installs MySQL and the phpMyAdmin tool for maintaining you MySQL databases.

PHP

If you do need to run PHP on your local box then XAMPP will set this all up for you. I have had to tweak the ini files to get some thing to run. Here is a quick guide:

cURL

This is a pain (but it makes you appreciate ColdFusion!),

You can find out more about Apache by downloading the free ACME ebook from http://www.acidlabs.org/public-speaking/goodies/

8 comments

  1. Just wanted to drop you a quick thanks for instructions. Simple setup using XAMPP and Coldfusion. Saved me a lot of time trying to figure it out.

    Comment by Ralphie – August 19, 2008
  2. You're welcome Ralphie :)
    You do also get the benefit of (dare I say it) having phpMyAdmin for administering your MySQL databases.

    Comment by John Whish – August 19, 2008
  3. Great article! Only I already installed Xammp as well as coldfusion8, now I still don't know how to link my appache server to coldfusion since there's no option to add a server in the coldfusion administrator panel. How do I go from here?
    Thanks for any help you could provide me...I'm a newbie to coldfusion.

    Comment by Frank Franckx – September 03, 2008
  4. Hi Frank,

    Welcome to ColdFusion :)

    I'm guessing that you already had ColdFusion installed (with the standalone server running on port 8500) before you put XAMPP on. You should be able to change ColdFusion's configuration files to point to Apache but it is not going to be simple and I wouldn't recommend it!

    I'd suggest uninstalling ColdFusion and then following the guide above.

    If you've got a bunch of settings in the CFIDE you want to keep then have a look at the Packaging & Deployment > ColdFusion Archives screen in your CFIDE to backup and deploy settings.

    Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

    Comment by John Whish – September 03, 2008
  5. Hi, I followed this guide to install CF into XAMPP, and now I'm getting 403's for all of my CF directories.

    Thoughts?

    Comment by Jaime – September 29, 2008
  6. @Jamie, this is probably because Apache doesn't have index.cfm set as the default file and directory browsing is disabled.
    You can change the default file in your virtual hosts file by adding this line:
    DirectoryIndex index.cfm index.html

    Comment by John Whish – September 30, 2008
  7. Dear John,

    the comment about PHP reads:

    If you do need to run PHP on your local box then XAMPP will set this all up for you. I have had to tweak the ini files to get some thing to run. Here is a quick guide:

    The trailing ':' implies that there is something to follow. But if I have understood your article correctly whatever it is is not there. Could you please help me out here because I am a real newcomer to Xampp & CF and I would like to get things right from the beginning.

    many thanks


    Michael

    Comment by Michael Message – October 27, 2008
  8. Hi Michael, most PHP code will run fine without any tweaking on XAMPP.

    My additional information was about setting up cURL which isn't part of the standard XAMPP setup. But if you don't need cURL then you don't need to do anything. XAMPP sets everything up to be a good development environment (don't use it on your production webserver) so most things should run without any issues.

    Comment by John Whish – October 28, 2008

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