Railo + OpenBD + ColdFusion on JRun

January 30, 2009 · 12 Comments

If you have ColdFusion installed in the multiserver configuration (which is the only way I ever install it!), it's easy to also install Railo on top of JRun in the same setup. With ColdFusion in multiserver configuration, you have:

{jrun.home}/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/

In that directory is META-INF/, containing application.xml, and cfusion-war/, containing the ColdFusion instance itself. Download the Railo 3.0.2 WAR file (at the bottom of the downloads page) and unpack the WAR file to a directory called railo-war. You can use jar xvf or rename the .war to .zip and just unzip it. Your railo-war/ directory should now contain WEB-INF/, index.cfm and License.txt. Now move that railo-war/ directory into the cfusion-ear/ directory mentioned above (so it's next to the cfusion-war/ directory. Finally, edit that application.xml file and copy the <module> definition for cfusion-war and change it to say railo-war for the web-uri and /railo for the context-root. Start ColdFusion and you'll see it starts both application servers. http://localhost/index.cfm is Adobe ColdFusion and http://localhost/railo/index.cfm is Railo CFML. If you write frameworks (like I do), this makes it easier to test across multiple engines. ~~I'll probably stick Open BlueDragon 1.0.1 in there next.~~ The same process works for the OpenBD WAR file. Caveats: 1. For OpenBD, I had to add an Apache alias for /openbd to match the location of the exploded WAR so that images loaded correctly (in the shiny new OpenBD Administrator - nice job guys!). 2. For both Railo and OpenBD, I experienced some problems with xmlParse() - OpenBD in particular said "The configured XML parser does not support JAXP 1.3." The solution to the second problem was to add the following to java.args in jvm.config:

-Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=
com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl

(all on one line, no space after the =)

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Tags: coldfusion · openbd · railo

12 responses so far ↓

1 Joel Richards // Jan 31, 2009 at 8:09 AM

Thank you for posting this. I now have railo running on one of my test machines!
2 Bas // Feb 6, 2009 at 1:40 AM

[quote]In that directory is SERVER-INF/, containing application.xml, and cfusion-war/, containing the ColdFusion instance itself.[/quote]

SERVER-INF/ should be META-INF/ ;-) Besides that is works fine! Thanks!
3 Sean Corfield // Feb 6, 2009 at 8:36 AM

@Bas, thanx for catching that - I'll update the post!
4 Dan Vega // Feb 13, 2009 at 7:24 PM

Thanks for the information Sean. I got openbd running on my vps today and everything is working great. My next question is how do i setup a development environment. When the application is ready I can just create a war file and push to production. I would love to see a post on how I can setup a development environment using ColdFusion/Openbd/Railo on JRun can all exists and how I can keep everything organized. Just an idea in case you get bored and need something to blog about! ha..thanks again
5 chris hough // Aug 17, 2009 at 12:27 AM

I am going through this setup, however, I am running into an issue, with openbd. it seems I am getting a 403 forbidden error and can not figure out where this is caused.

I am running osx as well.

also, considering the amount of memory this takes up, would it be more beneficial to setup up railo and openbd in separate instances? can this be done?

Thank you and I hope you had a great weekend
6 Sean Corfield // Aug 17, 2009 at 12:42 AM

@Chris, having multiple engines on one instance is likely to use less memory than having separate instances, each running one engine.

As for the OpenBD problems, try the OpenBD mailing list?
7 chris hough // Aug 17, 2009 at 10:35 AM

@Sean - very true, after staying up way late last night, I think I am going to try to run with tomcat which appears to be making headway, i am hoping to old start an instance when I want to test, and using apache tomcat appears to fix that, not 100% sure yet. I want to get adobe and railo working first.

hope you have a great week!
8 Rob Barthle // Oct 19, 2009 at 11:47 AM

"I am going through this setup, however, I am running into an issue, with openbd. it seems I am getting a 403 forbidden error and can not figure out where this is caused.

I am running osx as well. "

I second this, I am having the exact same problem, not sure where I went wrong? I'm pretty new to multi-server and JRun, I expanded the openbd.war contents in /Applications/Jrun4/servers/openbd11/ and JRun seemed to like it well enough, but all that runs is the index.jsp page when I go to the internal server on port 8302, the index.cfm file gives me the 403 error.
9 Sean Corfield // Oct 19, 2009 at 12:14 PM

@Rob, try asking on the Open BlueDragon mailing list. From the little info you've given, I'm not sure where to suggest you look. I don't think I've ever seen JRun give a 403 error like that - normally Apache is the part that says "forbidden" and that's due to a missing Allow from all configuration for the target directory.
10 Rob Barthle // Oct 19, 2009 at 12:38 PM

Thanks, I will do that. Considering the web server being used is the internal JRun one, I'm not sure where else to look for that.

I'm also giving Railo a try as well, first one to work wins! :-)
11 Leigh // Dec 14, 2009 at 7:00 PM

@Rob or @Chris,

Did you ever have any luck figuring out the 403 error?

-Leigh
12 Mike Henke // Jun 11, 2010 at 5:55 PM

I entered in a ticket with openbd http://code.google.com/p/openbluedragon/issues/detail?id=242

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