I can see you would not, but there are only 3 of us, supporting and developing a complex Warranty application for manufactures. We are all about the application and warranty business process and we rely on the management and advice for the servers on a small hosting company we have partnered with since 2004. We use cPanel on 3 servers and have never used CLI, so would not feel confident doing so. Anything we are not sure about server wise or need advice on performance and security issues we pass to our partners. We just would not get that kind of partnership with corporations like Amazon, we are nothing to them.
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Hi William,
If youâd like to work with a control panel that works well with Lucee, Iâd recommend VirtualMin. Itâs free and doesnât futz with permissions like cPanel does. Itâs the cPanel permission system that makes it a huge pain to work with. VirtualMin doesnât have that, and things âjust workâ. Itâs nice.
Brad and Mark,
I hope you know by now that I respect the hell out of you both, but I have to disagree with you on some of your assumptions. You seem to be looking at the world solely from a âsysopsâ perspective, and thatâs a very narrow viewpoint. William is a great example of WHY you donât want to limit yourself to that one particular viewpoint.
âWhy would I go to a hosting provider when I can spin up a⌠[insert whatever]â
⌠because not everyone knows how to use one of those. Not everyone knows âsysopsâ like you guys do. A smaller hosting provider (::points at William again:
can provide custom support to folks that do not know sysops and help them. When you recommend HSPâs like DI or Amazon youâre recommending providers that couldnât give two eggs from the same chicken about the people youâre sending them, and youâre cutting off potential grass roots supporters right at the root.
Most SMBâs - you know, the folks that make up the majority of the US economy - donât care about language. They want to get up and running quickly. Thatâs why simple platforms like WordPress are doing so staggeringly well.
ââŚa company who makes stacks of cash from selling Lucee hostingâŚâ
Do you know any companies like that? I donât. I know of one⌠maybe, but weâre not close enough friends for me to know the details of their financials. I DO know a hosting company that is passionate about Lucee and CFML in general, and they have done many many things to support Lucee over the years. Sometimes though, they need to focus on making ends meet. Companies like that need your support, just like you need theirs.
Bottom line: maybe recommending solutions that require sysops knowledge isnât always going to be the right fit.
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You are right but it should not stop me doing it. I donât know all the details of the users and I try to show them there is more to their profession and things they should learn for their own sake.
I didnât always know it. I wasnât born with congenital knowlege of the domain. I try to learn every day, I read, I test and that is how I get some knowledge. I also talk to ISPâs and people that DO know devops and sysops and see how I can work that into my workflow or clientâs workflows.
@William_Davison CLI is not the be-all and end all of your stack. I have been automating WINDOWS IIS / ColdFiusion deploys for a while now. Now you know itâs possible you can know that you donât need to depend on C-panel, but there are options out there for you to take.
I realise I have gone on a tangent. Regardless, @Jordan_Michaels makes great points and he is the person who would know as he runs a very good hosting company called Viviotech (do check them out)
You should also have a good chat with your partner hosting company and see where they can help, maybe simple pre-configured VMâs without Cpanel ?
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Thanks Mark for your message. I am hoping we can get Jordanâs âin-house docs: Install Lucee on cPanel w/Apache 2.4â working.
Jordan Our hosting people are asking âAre there any installation instructions for lucee / virtualmin?â
Does Virtualmin have automatic security updates?
They point out âYou lose a lot when you take away cPanel⌠Like daily security updatesâ
Hi William,
We simply use the Lucee Installer for Linux with VirtualMin. Thereâs really nothing to it. Install the OS (I recommend Ubuntu), install VirtualMin, install Lucee. Done.
For âdaily security updatesâ, you get those from the OS, not the control panel, so you wonât lose those by switching your control panel. Again, VirtualMin / Webmin has been around for an extremely long time. Theyâre tried and true. I donât have a horse in this race, so I have nothing to push. Iâm just recommending solutions that are simple and that I know will work. If you or your host are not comfortable switching control panels, thatâs totally cool. No matter what you choose to do, Iâm happy to help!
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How do i get VirtualMin home directory to default to /opt/lucee/tomcat/webapps
Iâd recommend just using the default home directory for sites you create in VirtualMin, personally. VirtualMin uses the standard â/home/[user]/public_html/â format. If youâre running as a non-root user, you will need to make sure that the user you set Lucee to run as has read access to the â/home/[user]/public_html/â directory, and write access to â/home/[user]/public_html/WEB-INFâ.
You could also potentially configure Lucee to write the WEB-INF directories to a single location by updating the Lucee servlet config in Tomcatâs web.xml file. The Lucee user will still need read access to your user directory though.
Hope this helps!
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Upgrading to Lucee 6 and learning Docker are both in my already gigantic todo list, but at the moment I have an urgent need to get away from Hostek. They were a great Lucee VPS host for many years with fantastic tech support, but unfortunately have been plagued this year with half a dozen or more major downtime events, plus now Iâm having issues with their billing department.
Iâm currently in the middle of a huge migration to InMotion Hosting and Iâm very much looking forward to the reliability of my new High Availability VPS with automatic replication across 3 different machines, plus a more reliable and faster network.
But that means I no longer have the crutch of experienced Lucee sysadmins configuring everything for me, which was what drew me to Hostek many years ago.
I ended up here looking for info on how to get Lucee working on a cPanel VPS, but since no one actually answered the original question (yes Docker is great but you all apparently have no clue of the power of cPanel especially when hosting multiple websites for clients or even just automating so many devops tasks for your own site), I ended up figuring it out on my own, mostly by close examination of all the files in my Hostek VPS and diffing vs what was installed on my new InMotion VPS.
As with most things in life, once you know the answer, it seems so simple.
There is no cPanel plugin required to run Lucee.
The issue is that cPanel dynamically generates the Apache config e.g. /etc/apache2/conf/httpd.conf, which removes the settings that are appended to that file by the Lucee installer. All you need to do after installing or reinstalling Lucee is copy those mod_proxy and mod_cfml settings and paste them into the Post VirtualHost Include block via WHM > Apache Configuration > Include Editor.
Voila!