ColdFusion Installation

As mentioned in the introduction to ColdFusion, you need to install ColdFusion before you can build ColdFusion applications on your local computer. Installing ColdFusion shouldn't take much more than 10 minutes.

Installation Steps

Below are the high-level steps to installing ColdFusion.

  1. Download ColdFusion from the Adobe website (Adobe is the company that produces ColdFusion). Adobe has this comparison of the ColdFusion editions to ensure you download the correct edition.

    Developer Edition

    The (free) developer edition provides the same functionality as the full-blown enterprise version. The only limitation is that you can only access the website from the local computer and two other IP addresses. Therefore you won't actually need to pay for ColdFusion in order to build your website. And as long as your web hosting provider supports ColdFusion, you won't need to pay anything else to use ColdFusion.

  2. Once downloaded, double click the installation file. This launches the installation wizard.
  3. Follow the various prompts. There are quite a few steps (around 15 or so), but most of them can remain at the default settings. The last step will install ColdFusion using the settings you provided at each step.

Once you've done that, ColdFusion will be installed on your computer. This should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes.

Here are detailed steps with screenshots if you need them.

Starting ColdFusion

Once ColdFusion has been installed, your web server should be able to render any ColdFusion file. That is, if it has a .cfm extension, your web server will pass it to ColdFusion to process. However, this will only occur if ColdFusion has in fact, been started.

You may need to start ColdFusion once you've finished the installation. Here's how to do that.

Windows

  1. Open a Command Prompt window
  2. Change directory to {cfroot}\cfusion\bin
  3. Run the following command: coldfusion.exe -start -console

You can also stop and restart ColdFusion. To stop ColdFusion use coldfusion.exe -stop -console. To restart use coldfusion.exe -restart -console.

UNIX/Linux/Solaris/MAC OS X

  1. Open a Terminal window
  2. Change directory to {cfroot}\cfusion\bin
  3. Run the following command: ./coldfusion start

To stop ColdFusion use ./coldfusion stop. To restart use ./coldfusion restart.

Note that {cfroot} means the ColdFusion root directory — the directory that it is installed in. On my Mac, the default installation was /Applications/Coldfusion2018.

Therefore, you could also use the following command to start CF: /Applications/Coldfusion2018/cfusion/bin/coldfusion start.

If you get the following message You must be the root user to configure the ColdFusion connector. Start ColdFusion as "sudo ./coldfusion start" to configure connector. you will need to start ColdFusion using the root user (i.e. using sudo).

You should only need to do this once (i.e. the very first time you run CF). Once the connector has been configured you should be able to run CF as a non-root user.

You can find the web server configuration tool at {cfroot}\cfusion\runtime\bin\wsconfig if you need to configure a web server with CF.

ColdFusion Migration

When you first open the ColdFusion Administrator (at http://127.0.0.1:8500/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm), ColdFusion migrates settings from any previous version of ColdFusion to the new version.

Log in using the ColdFusion Administrator password (i.e. the password that you provided earlier during the installation), then follow the prompts to complete the migration.