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Ubuntu 13 and ColdFusion Gotcha

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Over the holidays I bought myself a new laptop to use for development and tinkering. I immediately setup Ubuntu 13 on it, Sublime and all the other goodies I needed.

I initially installed Railo (with no installation issues) but had some unrelated problems with ORM/unit testing that I need to resolve. I was curious if I’d run into the same issues with Adobe ColdFusion so I grabbed a copy of ColdFusion 10 and tried to install.

It would chug along until I tried to connect it to Apache and then it would balk about the Apache configuration file.

I’d give it the path: /etc/apache2, but no go. I even tried to give it the full file path: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.

Nope.

In the help text was a clue - it mentioned httpd.conf which didn’t exist on my system.

Hmmmm.

After some digging I discovered ColdFusion is supported on Ubuntu 12 (LTS) and then I compared the Apache versions! Ding ding ding.

  • Ubuntu 13 - Apache 2.4
  • Ubuntu 12 - Apache 2.2

Apache 2.4 no longer has the httpd.conf file. Looking at how it’s setup in 2.2 I’m curious if you could duplicate that method and make it work in 2.4. I may setup a VirtualBox instance to test that but in the meantime I’m happy to have a working setup that I can actually write some code on.

Lesson learned - read the systems requirements!

Hopefully Adobe will make the installer flexible to look for either/or apache2.conf or httpd.conf.