How do you deploy ColdFusion local development environments?

Question

Let's say a new developer comes into your shop and you want to get him or her up and running without installing much software on a brand new PC. Ideally, she just pulls down a folder from a file share that contains her IDE (CFEclipse), tools, and ColdFusion instance with JRUN or Tomcat with all the settings preconfigured. She might have to install an SVN client for file system integration, but other than that, she can be in the door by 8:00AM and customizing her editor by 9:00AM.

When it's time to upgrade everyone, instead of wasting hours of developer time, everyone can pull down a fresh build of their environment, load up the project, and be ready to roll.

I know the basics are to do one CF installation to create a deployable WAR, tomcat is a folder, eclipse is a folder. I'm just not sure about bundling it all up with everything connected and good to go.

edit: DB server will be remote. No need for local setup

Answer 1

Here is the solution I was technically looking for, although, we are also experimenting with the VM solution. This is for ColdFusion 7, 8, and 9.

1) Download and install Adobe JRun4 (soon to be Tomcat!) from the Adobe website (soon to be Apache!). Install without the windows service. We created the folder C:\opt to hold everything.

2) Download and install ColdFusion with the J2EE configuration. We chose to use a WAR.

3) Follow the instructions on the Adobe website for deploying ColdFusion to JRun. This is definitely a little more complicated than any other install.

4) MyEclipse has a version with a JRun plug in for server management. Without this, you'll need to run a batch file to start and stop the JRun instance or use the built in tool

5) Fire up to localhost:8300 and configure the admin.

6) Create a CAR file from an existing CF server and import it into your Dev server using the CF admin package/deploy tools.

7) You can now drag and drop the 'C:\opt' folder to a network share. Any developer can take the share. If you have the mappings preconfigured to a standard location on C:\ for www files, then you don't need to adjust web or CF admin mappings. Otherwise, you'll need to adjust.

Answer 2

Another approach, you could use the free/open source virtualization software, VirtualBox and create a complete development environment in the form of a virtual machine that has everything installed (IDE, web servers, DB servers (as needed), source control, etc.).

Here's a link to a post from someone whose team is currently using this (at work, we're moving this way as well). VirtualBox for dev teams.

Anyway, @kevin.mansel's answer is great but I just wanted to add this as an alternative approach to getting a (new) team member up and running ASAP.

Answer 3

This is an answer of preference really.

One way is to burn an image of the entire environment, and have people build their machines according to the image. Once they are up and running, they can pull the project in from a git repo and they should be off and running.

Another way is to go through these steps...

1. Install CF Server on local machine
2. Install DB Server on local machine (if needed)
3. Setup CF Server with DataSources (if needed)
4. Install CF IDE (if needed)
5. Pull project in from Source Control
6. Setup Web Server Directories for Project

Should be good to go after that. Obviously there are some configuration issues that you'll have to go through for your specific projects...but...if you build your projects in a relative way, you should be able to drop them in any folder on your web server and it should run...however if you're building projects with canonical paths, you would have to setup a root and different port for each project if you wanted to run multiple projects on the same local machine (assuming you’re using localhost/127.0.0.1)

Purely a matter of choice in this realm.