Running Local Development servers

Starting a local development server

With CommandBox, we don't need to have Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion installed locally. With a simple command, we can make CommandBox go and get the CFML engine we've requested, and quickly create a server running on Undertow. Make sure you're in the root of your website, and then run:

The server will then start on a random port on 127.0.0.1 and will create a server.json file in your webroot. We can add various options to server.json to customize our server. Here's an example:

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    }
}

In this example, I've set the server name to myApp, meaning I can now start the server from any directory by simply calling start myApp. I've also specified a specific port, 60000, but you can specify any port you want, or just remove that to start on a random port each time. Lastly, I've enabled URL rewriting and pointed the URL rewrite configuration file to urlrewrite.xml, which is included starting from CFWheels 2.x. (If you've used the wheels new command to create your app, this will already be done for you).

Using custom host names

You can also specify hosts other than localhost: there's a useful CommandBox module to do that (Host updater) which will automatically create entries in your hosts file to allow for domains such as myapp.local running on port 80. You can install it via install commandbox-hostupdater when running the box shell with administrator privileges.

Controlling local servers

Obviously, anything you start, you might want to stop. Servers can be stopped either via right/ctrl clicking on the icon in the taskbar, or by the stop command. To stop a server running in the current directory issue the following:

You can also stop a server from anywhere by using its name:

If you want to see what server configurations exist on your system and their current status, simply do server list

myapp (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60000
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myapp

myAPI (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60010
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/myAPI

megasite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:61280
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/megasite

awesomesite (stopped)
 http://127.0.0.1:60015
 CF Engine: lucee 4.5.4+017
 Webroot: /Users/cfwheels/Documents/awesomeo

To remove a server configuration from the list, you can use server forget myapp. Note the status of the servers on the list are somewhat unreliable, as it only remembers the last known state of the server: so if you start a server and then turn off your local machine, it may still remember it as running when you turn your local machine back on, which is why we recommend the use of force: true in the server.json file.

Specifying different CF engines

By default, CommandBox will run Lucee (version 6.x at time of writing). You may wish to specify an exact version of Lucee, or use Adobe ColdFusion. We can do this via either setting the appropriate cfengine setting in server.json, or at runtime with the cfengine= argument.

Or via server.json

{
    "name":"myApp",
    "force":true,
    "web":{
        "http":{
            "host":"localhost",
            "port":60000
        },
        "rewrites":{
            "enable":true,
            "config":"urlrewrite.xml"
        }
    },
    "app":{
        "cfengine":"adobe@2018"
    },
}

You can of course run multiple servers, so if you need to test your app on Lucee 5.x, Lucee 6.x and Adobe 2018, you can just start three servers with different cfengine= arguments!

By default the Lucee server that CommandBox starts has all the basic Lucee extensions that you are going to need installed, but if need to minimize the size of the Lucee instance you launch, then you can use Lucee-Light by specifying cfengine=lucee-light in your server.json file. CFWheels can run just fine on lucee-light (which is after all, Lucee, minus all the extensions) but at a minimum, requires the following extensions to be installed as dependencies in your box.json. Please note you may have to add any drivers you need for your database to this list as well.

"dependencies":{
    "lucee-image":"lex:https://ext.lucee.org/lucee.image.extension-1.0.0.35.lex",
    "lucee-zip": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/compress-extension-1.0.0.2.lex",
    "lucee-esapi": "lex:https://ext.lucee.org/esapi-extension-2.1.0.18.lex"
}

Once added to your box.json file, while the server is running, just do box install, which will install the dependencies, and load them into the running server within 60 seconds.

Alternatively you can download the extensions and add them manually to your server root's deploy folder (i.e \WEB-INF\lucee-server\deploy)