Dizid

Railo is an open source server for CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) and it can be used as a alternative to Adobe Coldfusion Server.
Below is an howto for installing Railo Express 3.1 on Windows 7. Railo express is not recommended on production servers,
but it can be an easy and low footprint development or testing server. For production environments, install -for example- Railo with the Resin 3.1.9 server.

On the Railo site there is an installation manual, but i’ve added a few things to make it even more of a no-brainer, especially for creating a virtual host. This installation is tested only Windows 7 RC:

To install Railo Express 3.1 on Windows 7 RC as follows:

1. Download Railo express.
2. Unzip and copy the whole zip contents to a folder, for example: c:\railo31
3. In c:\railo31 click on start.bat
4. Go to http://localhost:8888, choose a password an login.  Configure your CFML server

Your server is now up and running.

If you want to make a new virtual host on your Railo server:

1. To start a new website, make a copy of c:\railo31\contexts\railo.xml
2. Rename this copied file to the hostname of your choice, for example mywebapp
3. In this new mywebapp.xml file, make 3 changes:
4. Change ‘webroot’ into ‘mywebapp’
5. Uncomment the ‘virtual hosts’ section and delete the 3 entries there.
6. Add ‘www.mywebapp.com to this virtual hosts section.
7. Now, add ‘127.0.0.1 www.mywebapp.com’ to the winows host file* (see below).
8. Under C:\railo31\ make a new folder named ‘mywebapp’ (note: not under ..\webroot)
9. Put an index.cfm with ‘Hello World’ in C:\railo31\mywebapp
10. Stop the Railo server and restart the Railo server
11. Go to http://www.mywebapp.com:8888 and you should see the ‘Hello World’ text.

* To edit the host file on Windows Vista and Windows 7:

1. Click Start – search for “Notepad“, right-click and select “Run as Administrator“.
2. Set it to All files (*.*) (because the host file has no extension)
3. Now, open the ‘host’ file from the File menu from C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ or %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\
4. Add 127.0.0.1 www.mywebapp.com (and ::1www.mywebapp.com for IP6?) to the end of this file and save it.

That’s it, you now have a fully function virtual host with a CFML server running and can start creating Coldfusion applications.