The CF2018 installer has removed the step that would offer to connect to you external web server (IIS or Apache). But you CAN still get the task done, using CF’s “web server configuration” or wsconfig tool instead.
If you’re moving to ColdFusion 2018, note that its installer no longer offers the step for integrating CF with your external web server (IIS or Apache), which is a real surprise for those who may have been installing CF for years. But you can still get the job done, if you know where to look.
That step of the installer would for years detect if you had an external web server installed (IIS or Apache), and it would offer to connect your newly installed CF to one or all web sites. It no longer does that (there’s been no documentation or explanation of that, that I have seen. Kudos to Aaron Neff for filing a bug report about it during the prerelease last year, but it was never added back. You should add a vote there to get it restored.)
Of course, the CF installer DOES still implements CF’s “built-in web server”, which is used to interact with the CF Administrator. But if you want to setup CF to your your own applications and web sites, most would want to do that via an external web server.
Some good news is that one certainly CAN do that web server intergration, by running the CF “web server configuration tool” (wsconfig), which is indeed still provided with CF2018 (as it has been for since at least CF6) and which is still documented in the manual, “Configuring and Administering ColdFusion“. See its section, “Connect to Web Servers“, and specifically that page’s section, “Web server configuration“. It covers using the wsconfig tool both with IIS and with Apache, and whether via a GUI or command tool (and even via silent installation).
That said, and even though that wsconfig tool is nearly as old as ColdFusion, I do realize that for those who never needed it (because the installer took care of their minimal needs for CF/web server configuration), it would be a good idea to do a post with more detail and screenshots on the process (which that doc page does not offer). I will consider that for a future blog post. In the meantime, I wanted to share this for any confused by the change in the installer.
Wizard
146 posts
Well, I pointed to the CF manual on “Configuring and Administering ColdFusion”. there is also one on “Installing ColdFusion”. Each of those would be over 100 pages, if printed.
I have a blog post pointing to these:
As I lament there, there’s no PDF as of CF2016 and above, but even the CF11 version (which had complete PDFs for each manual, and are available in an archive I point to) would be better than nothing.
Other than that, there’s no CF book focused on installation, tuning, admin, config, etc. I’ve wondered about doing one, but always felt like I’d be duplicating the effort of the CF docs–which is why I instead point people to those. It’s a bit like pushing rope. People just don’t look to the CF docs for this help, though it’s substantially there. Instead, they do seem to look for books. 🙁
Hi Charlie, I have a question: is there any book you can recommend or a place to learn from in order to know about CF installation, tuning and all that part, not coding related?
Thank you in advance!
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