Unfortunately, I came back from lunch yesterday to find my laptop was dead. I couldn't get it to load. It was a refurb unit that had served me well enough for three years. I was hoping to get another 6 months out of it; but it is what it is.

This put me in the unfortunate position of needing to set up a new development machine **NOW**. Thankfully, I have a new machine here just waiting to be set up for development. It gives me a slight delay before I have to replace the laptop.

The old machine had CF8 installed in the multi-server mode. I had used the CF8 instance manager to deploy multiple CF8 and CF9 instances of ColdFusion for development purposes. Could I take those instances created in CF8 and somehow use them in CF9 without having to recreate them from scratch? Yes, the answer is yes.

I wrote a bit my experiences moving these same CF8 instances from one machine to another in the past. Here is how I did it:

  1. First I installed Apache. It is my preferred web server. Then I stopped Apache, backed up the config files, and replaced the 'clean' config files with my old config files. This will give me all the info that attaches Apache to the CF Instances and what not.
  2. Then I installed ColdFusion 9; the multi-server edition. During hte install I attached it to my 'clean' config of Apache. I had no idea, when I was doing it, if that was a good idea or not but it worked and the 'old' Apache config seemed to connect up to ColdFusion without any issues. So now I have a working CF Administrator with an instance manager.
  3. Then I used winmerge to compared my old CF8 install directory and the new CF9 install directory. I copied over all my server instances--except for the cfusion one that was created by default. The server instances are located in the servers directory of the install.
  4. Finally, I scoured over all the differences in the winmerge report to figure out how CF was deciding what was an instance and what wasn't. There are two files:
    • lib\wsconfig\wsconfig.properties
    • lib\servers.xml
    I believe these two files contain all the data for how the CF Instance manager finds the instances. I used winmerge to move all my "old" instances into the new files. I restarted the Macromedia JRun and Macromedia ColdFusion instances, reloaded the admin and all my old 'CF8' instances showed up. Just like magic.

Now all I have to do is create the Windows services for these instances--as I talk about in my other post. Since CF10 is not going to use JRun, I'm not sure I'll be so lucky during the next upgrade.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2012 at 2:54 PM

posted by Jeffry Houser in ColdFusion, Professional
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