Apr 3
Just wrangled a new (well, used but new to me) MacBook for office use and I wasted no time getting a development installation of ColdFusion on it so I can work with examples and code when I go to CFUnited Express in Atlanta in a handful of days. I had no idea what I was doing because not only am I a fairly weak Apache administrator, but I'm also a Mac noob. Here's what I did.
Quick Note: Any manual file creation/modification steps may need a "sudo" command for root level permissions. For example, to edit a configuration file with vi (or pico, ya cowards) you would type: sudo vi httpd.conf
ﾠ
- Make a dummy httpd.conf file in /etc/httpd/ if it's not there (more on this later)
- Install ColdFusion 8.0.1 using the following configuration values:
- Choose third party web server connector for Apache
- Point it to /etc/httpd for configuration and /usr/sbin for the application/server directory
- The document root (to install CFIDE into) should beﾠ/Library/WebServer/Documents
- Open the Leopard Sharing preferences to turn off then turn on again the Web Sharing service
Done! Now open up a web browser and hit up http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm to finish your installation (which the installer prompts you to do, but make sure you've restarted Web Sharing).
Now let me elaborate on that first step a little. I was expecting to see my httpd.conf file in /etc/httpd but it wasn't there. So I opened up a Terminal and ran httpd -V to get a read out of the configuration settings. It tells me this interesting tidbit:
SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf"
Okay... that's something I know nothing about. But it's definitely the active configuration file. When I tried to input that directory path as the "Apache configuration" location for the CF installer, every time I tried to choose it the path bounced back to /etc/httpd again! I'm thinking there is some kind of sym-link or shadow directory thing going on here. I'll need to research this more.
So what I ended up doing here was to create an empty httpd.conf file in /etc/httpd so the installer had a place to add the Apache JRun settings. After the installer was done, but before I tried to browse to the administrator, I copied the settings additions it made to /etc/httpd/httpd.conf (my fake file) into the real deal over in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf. I restarted the Web Sharing (restarting Apache, really) and it all came together. I was in the CF administrator!
I hope this helps some folks out there who are trying to setup a straight forward CF8 dev machine on a MacBook. I saw a lot of very helpful guides out there, but many are older (at least the top ranking ones on Google) and didn't apply here.
UPDATE - August 4th, 2009
A colleage recently followed my instructions in this post and ran into some issues related to the Java OS X Update 2.ﾠ After his laborious research (thanks!) he found these two excellent blog posts and comment threads that help hone in on the problem and solve it.
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