Installing ColdFusion 9 Developer Edition on a Mac
Installing Adobe’s ColdFusion 9 Developer Edition on your Mac is a walk in the park thanks to the installation wizard. However, there are a few things in the wizard that might lose you along the way. This tutorial shows you how I got ColdFusion installed on my MacBook Pro and up and running alongside my Apache web server.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
I used to work for a company that didn’t have a staging server for it’s web sites. They only had one working copy of each site and those were the live ones. This didn’t make my job easy. I was asked to work on very complex web applications that pulled in quite a bit of revenue for the company. We’re talking lifelines of the business. Any mistake made in the code could crash the whole site and lose the company mucho dinero. Fortunately for me, I work on a Mac which comes with Apache and PHP preinstalled. I had installed MySQL previously and I only needed to install one more thing before I had a perfect copy of the production server. Adobe ColdFusion 9.
ColdFusion is not free. You have to purchase a license if you want to install it on your production server. You can, however, download the Developer Edition of ColdFusion 9 and install it on your personal computer for free. Thank you, Adobe. Installing ColdFusion is pretty straightforward. Adobe provides an install wizard that walks you through the process but there are a few steps along the way that might lose you. The instructions below were the steps I followed to get ColdFusion 9 to work alongside my existing development web server on my computer.
What You’ll Need
- Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6
- Adobe Account (free)
- Adobe ColdFusion 9 Developer Edition 64-bit (free)
- Web Sharing enabled in System Preferences
- 10 minutes
You’ll need to do a few things before we begin the installation process. In order to download the developer edition, you’ll need to create an Adobe Account. Once you’ve completed the signup process and have logged in, navigate to the ColdFusion downloads page. Find the drop down box labeled “Adobe ColdFusion 9 Developer Edition” and select “English | Mac OS X 64-bit | 406.4 MB”. See screenshot below.
The installation process should take no more than 10 minutes. And while you can get ColdFusion up and running on Tiger these instructions are specifically for mac users who are running Leopard or Snow Leopard. I believe Tiger users can follow these instructions using the 32-bit version of the ColdFusion Developer Edition. Leopard and Snow Leopard users will need to stick with the 64-bit version. Also, if you plan to run ColdFusion alongside the built in Apache web server you’ll need to enable web sharing. You can find this in System Preferences > Internet & Wireless > Sharing.
Installing ColdFusion 9 Developer Edition
Unzip the downloaded file and double-click the ColdFusion 9 Installer.
Click Next on the Introduction window.
Agree to the License Agreement
Choose ‘Server configuration’.
Click ‘No’ when it asks if ColdFusion 9 is currently installed on your computer.
The 64-bit version of ColdFusion uses a lot of RAM. I opted out of the ‘Start ColdFusion’ on system init’. I only want it to run when I need it to.
The default installation directory worked for me.
Select ‘No’ when it asks if there are earlier versions of ColdFusion installed. Unless, of course, there are.
For the next step, I chose ‘Configure web server connector for ColdFusion’. This will allow ColdFusion to work alongside the Apache web server if you’re using it.
This next step left me a little confused the first time I saw it in ColdFusion 7. It simply wants to know where the Apache directory is located. Type in ‘/etc/apache2′ in the Configuration Directory field and click ‘OK’.
Click Next on the Configure Web Servers/Websites window.
This next window just wants to know where your web server root is located. Basic setups will be located at /Users/your-name/Sites. I try to keep my development server setup as close to my production server as possible. My server root is located at /var/www.
If you are planning on working with OpenOffice in your application, check this box, or else keep it blank and click Next
Create an Administrator password. This is not your user account password for your computer. Click Next
I plan on being the only developer working on my machine. I left RDS unchecked. Click Next
Enter your computer password. This gives the installer permission to continue. Click Next
Look over the summary window to make sure all of your settings are correct. Click Install if everything looks good.
Almost there. We need to launch the ColdFusion Administrator site. Keep the checkbox at the bottom checked and click Done.
Log in using your ColdFusion password.
Don’t click Continue. I didn’t read all of the text the first couple of times of installing. I thought ‘Continue’ meant ‘Go to the next step’ and not ‘Stop me from finishing’. Just wait.
Setup Complete. Click OK.
Welcome to the ColdFusion Administrator!
Wrapping Up
Once you get to the ColdFusion Administrator, go ahead and bookmark it. You’ll be using it a lot.