ColdFusion on Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.10 was released earlier this month and I thought that I really ought to learn more about Linux, so I decided to install a web server and ColdFusion on an old laptop I had. I'm pretty new to Linux so I expect these instructions could be better, but I wanted to document them for my own purposes and maybe they help others take to leap to Linux.

If you’re looking to set up a Ubuntu ColdFusion server, then Paul Kukiel wrote an excellent guide on: http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-apache-and-coldfusion-9-on-ubuntu-9.04

I actually installed ColdFusion on a Ubuntu varient called Xubuntu which is suppose to be less resource hungry, which is perfect for the aging laptop I'm using! So here is what I did:

First off I installed the classic Apache, PHP and MySQL stack. You may wonder why I want PHP as well? Well, I do occasionally work on PHP sites and the excellent phpMyAdmin (which is a web front end for managing MySQL) is written in PHP.

To install Apache, PHP and MySQL, open up terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type in the following:

sudo tasksel 

You’ll be asked to enter your password. If you see the message “command not found” then you need to do an extra step of installing tasksel. (Up until Ubuntu 10.10 Tasksel was installed by default).

sudo apt-get install tasksel

In the terminal window you’ll see the tasksel package manager which is dead handy for a n00b like me for installing server applications. If you scroll down the list, you’ll see “LAMP server”, just hit the spacebar to highlight it. For the adventurous, you’ll see that you can also install PostgreSQL, DNS server or a Mail Server as well.

Once you’ve selected LAMP server, hit the enter key. The install process will now start. You’ll be prompted to enter information such as the MySQL root password you want to use etc. As I’m setting up a dev box I left mine blank.

After the install finishes you’ll be returned to the normal terminal. To test you’re install, fire up a browser and type in http://localhost/. You should see:

It works!

This is the default web page for this server.

The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.

OK, so we’ve got the LAMP stack up and running - next up is ColdFusion. Sadly, you need to login to the Adobe site to download ColdFusion, so you can’t do any clever terminal commands (I imagine this must a real pain on a headerless Ubuntu Server). So, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/, login and download the 32 or 64bit version ColdFusion for Linux.

Assuming that you’ve downloaded the ColdFusion bin file to your downloads directory, type in the following into terminal (remember that Linux is case-sensitive):

cd Downloads

Next, we need to make sure that we have execute permissions.

chmod 777 ColdFusion_9_WWE_linux.bin

Before we install ColdFusion, there is a library that is required which you need to install (hat tip to Paul Kukiel for this info)

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Once that has installed, we should be able to install ColdFusion:

sudo ./ColdFusion_9_WWE_linux.bin -i gui

By specifying “-i gui”, we actually get the nice GUI installer which you have on Windows (I’m sure Linux gurus shudder at this!).

If you want to install ColdFusion as standard or multi-server is up to you, I’m installing the multi-server version.

You can use the default settings, however when you get to the “Configure Web Servers” dialog, then you need to enter the following information for Apache:

Web Server: Apache



Configuration Directory: /etc/apache2



Directory and file name of server binary: /usr/sbin/apache2



Directory and file name of server control script: /etc/init.d/apache2

On the next screen, install the ColdFusion Administrator to:

/var/www

When asked if you which user you want to run ColdFusion as it’s a good idea to create a new user in “User and groups”, instead of using the ”nobody” account.

Once the installer has finished you will need to start ColdFusion to get it running. In the terminal type:

sudo /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun -start cfusion

After a short time you’ll see that ColdFusion Server has started, but our work isn’t done yet. The final step is configure the web server connectors. Again in terminal type:

sudo /opt/jrun4/bin/cf-connectors.sh

You should see the “Connector installation succeeded for apache” message, so now we need to restart Apache for it to pick up the changes.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

If you now go to your browser and type in:

http://localhost/cfide/administrator/

You should see the ColdFusion Administrator!

A couple of other useful commands;

You can stop ColdFusion by typing

sudo /opt/jrun4/bin/jrun -stop cfusion

You can restart Apache using:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I'd welcome any input from Linux gurus :)

• Posted in:
• ColdFusion
• Apache
• Linux

3 comments

1. I love how easy most of the setup of CF on Linux is but agree that Adobe have to get with the times and offer a wget or curl friendly download site! In the past I have managed to fake out the adobe site by passing cookies in via Curl but generally I just use lynx on the headless server (or upload over SFTP if it's a dev box).
   
   Just a quick note and apache commands - I get into the habit of using 'sudo apache2ctl -k graceful' for restarts in place of the init.d script as it staggers the restart until the server isn't doing anything thus preventing you from booting any existing users.
   
   Comment by Rob – October 20, 2010
2. @Rob, thanks for the tip. I've got a lot to learn!
   
   Comment by John Whish – October 21, 2010
3. Thanks for the tutorial. It was a great help. I used a little different command and from the terminal instead of gui. I have used the command:
   sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion start
   
   instead of yours. It works fine. I am totally new to coldfusion. I hope I will do good here. Let me know if you have any suggestion.
   
   Comment by sakib – December 02, 2011