PDF extension won't install

dev support
1

I have been using CFML with Lucee for over 10 years, but until now have not had to install anything beyond the original installation. Now my customer needs PDF files created on the fly from CFML/HTML so I read up on the tags and the sketchy information that is available about Flying Saucer. Is Flying Saucer still the recommended extension for PDFs? Is FS the PDF extension that my version of Lucee came preinstalled with?

In any case, I installed Ant with no problems. (See “stack” info below.) I went into my Lucee Server Admin to see about installing the PDF extension. It said I already have version 1.0.0.68 installed, and lists the following as available versions: 1.1.0.19, 1.1.0.7, 1.0.0.94, 1.0.0.80, 1.0.0.75, 1.0.0.72, 1.0.0.67, 1.0.0.66, 1.0.0.65, 1.0.0.64, 1.0.0.63, 1.0.0.62, 1.0.0.61, 1.0.0.60, 1.0.0.59, 1.0.0.58, 1.0.0.57, 1.0.0.56, 1.0.0.55, 1.0.0.54, 1.0.0.53, 1.0.0.52, 1.0.0.51, 1.0.0.50, 1.0.0.49, 1.0.0.48, 1.0.0.16, 1.0.0.15

I tried to upgrade to the latest version, using the “Update or downgrade your already installed version.” by selecting “update to 1.1.0.19.”

That didn’t work. It took many minutes and then filled up the screen with garbage. There was no error message. I logged out of the Lucee server and logged back in. It still said I have 1.0.0.68 installed, and lists the same available versions as above.

I don’t know what to do from here. Should I update to each successive version above my current one until I reach 1.1.0.19? That would require me to do 6 updates, which I’m okay with as long as that is the best thing for me to do. If you think there is a better way for me to do this, you’ll have to explain it on a VERY newbie level so that I can understand it. There is also an option to uninstall. Should I be uninstalling before attempting to update?

Don’t forget to tell us about your stack!

OS: Windows 10
Java Version: 11.0.16
Ant Version: 1.9.16 (installed today)
Tomcat Version: 8.0.32
Lucee Version: 5.2.5.20

Thanks,
Zy

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That version is old and not CVE free. Please try using the most recent and CVE free version of Lucee. I’d personally try the latest release candidate (RC).

You just need ANT for developing the extension, not for running it with your Lucee engine.

The PDF extension uses Flying Saucer since Lucee 5.3 and as far as I know, it should come preinstalled with that Lucee version. See Flying Saucer PDF Engine - CFDOCUMENT :: Lucee Documentation

Please upgrade your Lucee Version first, then take a look at the extension overview in your Lucee Administrator. If the extension is not installed, install it from there.

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First of all, I will ask for patience. I have been coding CFML since Allaire’s CF version 4.5. That’s a long time. However, I know very little about GitHub, repositories, etc. More to the point, I know practically nothing about installing Lucee. I’ll take the advice of @andreas and will reinstall Lucee to at least a 5.3.X version. But I don’t really know the first thing about doing that. I installed Lucee and Tomcat many years ago right after the fork of Lucee from Railo. I have not revisited the topic since. I remember the task being incredibly difficult, especially the part of getting Lucee and Tomcat happy with each other. I hope I’m not in for a repeat of that experience.

Basically, I don’t care how Lucee gets installed or how it runs. I just want my CFMs. etc., to run in a safe version of the server that incorporates the latest upgrade of the FS PDF extension.

To that end, the only absolutely important folders to me are … webapps\ROOT*.* Right now the full path to my source code is C:\lucee\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\ I don’t care about the C:\lucee\tomcat\webapps part of that. That’s installation stuff. I’ll learn what I have to in order to get that installed. It’s the … ROOT*.* that contains everything I’ve worked on since Railo.

That said, there are two machines where I need working Lucee engines. My own machine listed in the Don’t forget to tell us about your stack! section of the original message above. (My Windows 10). The second is where all this runs on my customer’s computer:

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I will need help installing Lucee on both those machines.

So forgive me, but I have to start at the beginning. In this doc:
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it says:

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So, as a starting point, which of these three ways would you suggest I do it?

And a further question: Do any of these installation methods require me to do anything with Tomcat? Or more to the point, do any of these installation methods NOT require me to do anything with Tomcat, as this was the most difficult part I encountered in the past when moving from Railo to Lucee.

Let’s take the easiest and simplest route to get where I need to be, so that any of you volunteering your time to help me won’t get frustrated with what I don’t know. (I know … that’s a LOT!)

Thank you in advance,
Zy Danielson

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Hi @Zy_Danielson, thanks to be very sincere… I appreciate it a lot.
Ssince the time you installed Lucee lots of things changed: The documentation is being added/updated almost on a daily basis. We all “just want to run .cfm”, but we all need to live with the fast changes, as computers, html, javascript, web dev techniques, security, laws, society and all the software that drives this ecosystem evolves in a very fast manner with an accelerating speed. If you run a business and you rely on all its ecosystem to run it, you need to evolve with it. That might be a pain and sometimes it’s very demanding… but ALL of us are exposed to that… It’s likely you are getting some help here, but sorry to be sincere, nobody will get all your job done for you without a compensation, because we all need to deliver elsewhere.

But, for a start, please see this Lucee Video Installation Guide, it may help you a little in a more visual way of installing Lucee.

Good Luck

By the way, those videos took me quite some time to prepare, structure and record. Would be nice if you could share your experience with us also, to enhance the Luee documentation. I note that I’m not in the official Lucee team. I’m just a guy like you helping them and all others by adding my experiences here and there to make everything easier. Fortunately we have many in this community like me who do the best to share their experience.

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Hello @andreas, thanks for your response. I wasn’t trying to get out of the hard work. I was just trying to establish my starting point. :wink: I am, however nearly 71 years old, so, with any luck this may be the last time I have to install Lucee. LOL

I will watch those 5 videos tomorrow. Thank you for the effort you put into them. I will certainly comment on the experience of reinstalling Lucee, as I go through the steps and when I am finished.

A couple of questions: I assume installing on Windows Server 2016 will be very similar to installing on Windows 2019 server? Will these procedures work for Windows 10 as well? And … if I’ll be serving pages with IIS, does that mean I will not be needing or using Apache/Tomcat? Hopefully I’ll know how to ask more intelligent questions after I watch the videos.

Thank you again, @andreas … more soon,
Zy

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6

If you are running with IIS on Windows i’ve found the Lucee install (and upgrades) to be incredibly simple, i don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with them not working (like in the bad old days).

As i think was mentioned in the threads, if you just install recent version of lucee you should be good to go to run CFM pages and create PDF’s using the tags.

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Thank you for the encouragement, @ebrewer. This will be my first time working with IIS. But how could it be more difficult than the bad old days. LOL

I feel like I’m in very good hands with these 5 videos @andreas has put together for us all. I will begin working with the reinstallation this afternoon.

I survived Railo, you know. This should be a piece of cake. :rofl:

Stay tuned for my feedback on the @andreas vids.

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Got tied up and was unable to do the reinstallation today. Plan on doing it tomorrow. I watched the videos. Can’t say I understood them, but hopefully I’ll be able to follow them okay.

Question: Is there anything I should do to my old installation before installing the new one? Like maybe rename c:\Lucee to c:\Lucee_old so that I can more easily go back to what I had in case something goes wrong with the new installation? Or should I backup my full disk image of c: drive and my OS and then let the new installation write over the old files in c:Lucee?

I’m a bit nervous about this whole process.

And @andreas if you’re still monitoring this thread, one question of mine that didn’t get answered is whether these videos will be the same for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 as it is for the 2019 Server in the vids? Or at least similar enough for me to track it all?

Oh and is there any way to transfer old settings in admin to the new installation? I’m concerned about my database connections. I had some trouble getting those to run when I set this all up.

Or, is there any way I can run my current admin the way it is and run the new installation admin in another window so I can compare old with new? Anything I need to do differently to make this happen?

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Rule number one:
Always backup EVERYTHING first. Make a Snapshot of the complete system!!! Always! I hope you are not doing this on the procuction server.

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I’ll be doing it first in my dev environment, my Windows 10 machine. But once I’m up and running here I will have to do it on the production server also, the Windows 2016 Server. Otherwise, there would be no point in upgrading if I can’t get the new projects to run (in production) that I will be developing using PDF files over the next several months.

I do have an extra Windows 11 machine here in the office, separate from my Windows 10 dev machine and my customer’s Windows 2016 production Server. Maybe I’ll try installing on the extra Windows 11 machine first. But the whole point of this exercise is aimed at getting a safe version of Lucee with the PDF extension onto the production server.

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I got a successful installation on my Windows 10 Dev Machine.
My old lucee service was still in existence and running, and that was causing the Windows Installer to fail at the point where it was trying to create the lucee service. To fix, I stopped the service, edited the registry to backup and then delete the lucee service. Then rebooted. After that, The Windows Installer ran to completion without problems. Nothing further was required to run the server using Apache instead of IIS, which is what I wanted.

Now the first half of my goal is a complete success. Lucee version 5.4.3.2 is installed and running with the latest version of FS PDF extension.

All that’s left to do is repeat the process on my customer’s Windows 2016 Server (Production Machine).

Skip the Rest of this Post, as it was solved as stated above.

I have tried to install 3 times on my Windows 10 Dev Machine. No luck.

Question: Does the Windows Installer only work in conjunction with IIS? Will it not run under just Apache/Tomcat? If it will work in conjunction with Apache/Tomcat alone, what adjustments are required of the installation process to accommodate that? Can I install using the Windows Installer and then make these adjustments so that Apache is serving the pages?

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Because you are already upgrading, please uograde to the latest stable:

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I thought I understood the version numbering system. Am I mistaken? Looking strictly at the numbers, it would seem to me that 5.4.3.2 is a later version than 5.4.3.15. That’s why I chose it to upgrade to. It’s true that on the download page, the dropdown positions 5.4.3.15 above 5.4.3.2. This confuses me. Should I trust the version number as Lucee has defined it? Or trust the position in the dropdown table?

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In opensource projects, numbers go from 0 - X, where X is always the largest value.

So that “15” is fifteen.

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All the numbers separated by a dot are purely incremental, just like an integer (index). 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,…

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Thanks for the clarification, @Terry_Whitney and @andreas

:slightly_smiling_face:

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Hello. I decided to reopen this topic. I’m trying to install the highest version of Lucee 5 to the server now. I decided to try installing it through the Lucee Server Admin as my first attempt. Here is the setup:

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Unfortunately this has been running for over an hour since I clicked the update button. Should I assume the update has failed? And, if so, what now? I opened another browser tab and tried to run a CF application. It still runs. What does this mean on a failed install? Or perhaps it hasn’t failed? Can it take many hours to complete? How long should I let it run?

-OR- should I refresh the browser window where the Lucee Admin is running? Close it and open another one? I don’t want to mess anything up. I will leave it running until I get a reply to this thread.

Thanks in advance to anyone who may be able to help.

~ Zy

::::: Edit :::::

I let it run for 4 hours and then stopped it. I had made a copy of the lucee folder before I started. I deleted the failed installation lucee folder and copied back the original. The good news is that the old version ran fine.

So my next question is this: was trying to upgrade from 5.2.1.9 to 5.4.3.16 too big of a jump for an Administrator upgrade? Should I try upgrading in smaller jumps and just do more of them? Or forget the Administrator upgrade and do an installation from scratch instead?

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There could be multiple factors into why this is not updating for you.

I do not think its a version jump factor so much as some other external factors outside the lucee ColdFusion server itself. Permissions, tomcat modules, java version, processes …

Your best bet would be to either do a fresh install or stop the application server (Lucee / tomcat) and then manually install the update / upgrade.

If you want to further get into how to troubleshoot and resolve this, then we would need specifics such as hypervisor (if any) os, java version, and environment vars.

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Hello @Terry_Whitney. I will do a fresh install tonight using the Windows installer and report the results here in this thread. Hopefully that will work and we won’t have to get into further troubleshooting. Thank you for your attention to this.

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It worked. Everything is running perfectly on the production Windows 2016 Server. And both the production machine and my Windows 10 dev machine are running from the same Lucee version 5.4.3.16.

I’ll wait for some months before I upgrade both machines to Lucee 6. There are so many releases happening on Lucee 6 still. I’ll wait until that settles down some. I expect I will be able to do the upgrade to 6 inside the Lucee Administrator, since both machines are running fresh installs.

My deepest thanks to everyone who participated in this thread.

~ Zy Danielson

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