Installing ColdFusion 8 On Windows Vista and IIS 7

There are lots of other guides out there that explain how to install ColdFusion on IIS7, but I haven't found any specifically for ColdFusion 8. Not much is different from the CF 7 guides.

To be honest I had high hopes and expected ColdFusion to not have any problems installing out of the box, so first I enabled IIS and installed CF. When that didn't "just work" I went looking for information.

I ended up working from this guide, and did everything there that I hadn't already done. For some reason, I still got an error, which I'm now wishing I had taken a screenshot of before I fixed it. I've tried breaking my installation to get it back, but can't get the exact same error message. If memory serves, it just said, "Server Error" and had a single line of meaningless IIS information under that. (So you're not missing much...)

Some more googling gave a hint, but not a definitive answer, that what I needed to do was use the Web Server Configuration Tool.

So start that puppy up:

(Yes, I use the kitten as my icon. Got a problem with that?)

And that brings up this bad boy:

Notice that there are no configured web servers. That is a pretty big clue, right there. (Facepalm, anyone?)

So we're going to ... you guessed it ... click the "Add..." button. And that brings up this mofo right here:

The only change I made on this screen was to check "Configure web server for ColdFusion 8 applications" -- the rest were the default settings. There are a couple of settings available by clicking the "Advanced..." button that I'm not sure about, so I left them at their default settings as well.

I chose the default settings because I don't do anything fancy on my local machine. I don't have the need to run multiple instances of ColdFusion, nor configure anything special web-server-wise. I'm a vanilla-install kind of guy. 

Click OK, Exit the Web Server Configuration Tool, and you're off and running.

in Posted 2009-02-11 08:17

4 responses:

Laura Norris
Laura Norris 2009-02-12 1:00 PM #
Good to know! I'm familiar with the Web Server Configuration Tool because it is used when you install with the Multiserver configuration. I've never done anything with the Advanced options.
Chris Dawes
Chris Dawes 2009-02-24 11:59 PM #
If you enable the iis6 compatability tools when you enable iis on vista, CF installs perfectly.
Luis Majano
Luis Majano 2009-03-01 9:27 PM #
Unfortunately, I get "NONE" as default websites for IIS.
Andrew Clarke
Andrew Clarke 2009-04-21 10:14 AM #
Hey Luis. I had the same problem and followed Chris Dawes' advice and checked "IIS 6 Management Compatibility". This did the trick. This is using Windows Server 2008 64-bit, with 64-bit ColdFusion. Hi from a happy ColdBox user :-)

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