Sunday 1 February 2015

Lucee: hiccups when getting a new Express install running

G'day:
These are as much "notes to self" as anything else. Railo Express used to run on Jetty which was simply "unzip and run". Lucee express is now on Tomcat, and I think if one never had Railo / Lucee / Tomcat installed before it would also be "unzip and run", but I had a coupla hiccups along the way, so I thought I'd jot them down here to remind me what needs doing, and it might help other people if they get stuck too.



First things first, I've been using Tomcat on and off for a decade, but I never do enough with it to need to become familiar with it, so if I'm not doing things perfectly here: let me know.

  1. Download Lucee Express from the website.
  2. Install it. IE: unzip the download, stick it somewhere. I have put it in C:\apps\lucee\express (henceforth the [lucee] directory).
  3. I had to check that my CATALINA_HOME value wasn't being set elsewhere. It was, because I had Railo Tomcat also installed. I deinstalled Railo, and blew away the CATALINA_HOME value in my environment variables. I learned I needed to do this the hard way... when I first started up Lucee it was trying to unpack stuff in C:\apps\tomcat\[etc] which is where the old CATALINA_HOME value was pointing. TBH, I'm not sure Lucee Express should use these settings? Especially because it didn't work when it tried to (and reported no problem).
  4. One one of my machines I also needed to create a JRE_HOME environment variable, pointing to my JRE directory. This made me raise my eyebrow as I expected JAVA_HOME to be sufficient, but it turns out that it was pointing to an invalid directory. I guess JRE_HOME is a fall back.
  5. Ran the [lucee]\startup.bat (there's a startup.sh as well for non-Windows users). After a few seconds of deploying stuff, I was up and running.
  6. Verified the site worked on http://localhost:8888. Verified the admin worked on http://localhost:8888/lucee/admin.cfm
  7. Shut Lucee down.
  8. Changed the port I was using in [lucee]\conf\server.xml. Look for the reference to 8888. I just wanted to use 8450 instead. This stepis just personal preference, but it's what to do if you want to change ports.
  9. In the same file change the <engine> defaulthost from localhost to lucee.local (again: it's just my preference to not use localhost).
  10. In the same file change the defined <host> to use the name lucee.local too.
  11. In [lucee]\conf\web.xml, set the listing param to be true.
  12. In the same file, comment-out the welcome files. These last two steps are because in my development environment, I don't want index.cfm being served by default, I just want a directory listing instead.

Having done this, I was up and running.

Nothing scintillating there. Like I said: more notes to self than anything else.

--
Adam