So since I got my new Dell at home I've been using my old Dell as a 'pseudo-server' and connecting to it over my home network for local development. This has been working out fine - but there has always been something that bugged me about using the built in web server that ships with ColdFusion as a development server. Every time you wanted to create a new 'site' you pretty much have to code around the fact that you're really under one wwwroot. For example lets say you have the following directory structure:

• wwwroot
  • site1
    • components
      • myComponent.cfc
  • site2
    • components
      • myComponent.cfc

In the example above I might have the following code under site1:

Pretty standard stuff really - just creating an instance of the myComponent.cfc under site1. Well the pain of the matter happens when you decide to move site1 up to a production environment. In most cases you'll want the contents under site1 to be the actual root of your site. Otherwise your URL might look something like http://mysite.com/site1 - which may be what you intended - but usually isn't. So now you've also got the pain of coding around a poorly planned site that could potentially have many references to the single root development environment.

So the standard fix to creating a workable development environment is to run ColdFusion in the multi-server configuration (which is available as an option when installing CF).

I've chosen to focus a few posts on setting up ColdFusion on IIS for a few reasons. First of all I like GUI's. I'm not afraid to admit it. I've tried to mess with Apache and it seemed like a pain in the rear for a GUI geek like me. No, I know it's really not that hard - but hell - it's my Vista and I'll GUI if I want to (sorry Brian you couldn't talk me out of it ;) Actually to be fair I did attempt to install Apache but ran into issues getting the latest release to install on Vista (insert Vista sucks comments below). I also liked the fact that IIS 7 appears to be able to handle multiple sites in a development environment. To top it all off it's free - at least it is on Vista Premium which is what I'm running.

So I'm going to post at least a few more posts on how to get ColdFusion running on IIS7 (on Vista). There not going to be anything groundbreaking for some folks who know this stuff like the back of their hands but for beginners I think it should be an enlightening journey.

Step One is simple. So simple in fact I'm not even going to post the instructions since it's already been done for me. So if you're playing along at home your first step will be to hit that tutorial and get IIS running. The next step is to do a simple ColdFusion install and follow the prompts for a multi-server config. CF should recognize IIS running on your machine and you'll want to tell the install wizard to make CF available for all sites under IIS. Everything else is a pretty standard CF install.

Update: Please read this comment...