Setting up on Windows

I have a blank windows 7 machine and I want to setup Lucee so that I can begin to learn about this most interesting tool. Is there an installation script which will install everything I need?

Don’t forget to tell us about your stack!

OS: ???
Java Version: ???
Tomcat Version: ???
Lucee Version: ???

Here you go, Lucee has an installer for Windows

Keep in mind Windows 7 no longer unsupported by MS since a year

Zac, thanks for the response. I followed your link and this gets me to “Downloads Lucee core and extension” and under Release, there is a choice of: Express,
Coming Soon,
Lucee.jar,
Lucee.jar(without extension),
Core,
War.

Which of these do I select?

Looks like there’s no installer for 5.3.7.48 yet. The latest one is for 5.3.7.47:

https://download.lucee.org/?releases=05.003.007.0047.100#core

Use that and then you can easily update to 5.3.7.48

If you want to test Lucee then use Commandbox, it makes it easy to install and start servers. Checkout the manual: Getting Started Guide - CommandBox : CLI, Package Manager, REPL & More

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Windows 7 is end of life as of 1/7/20 - I would highly suggest you look for something else to develop on. As for Lucee and ColdFusion development, other than path structure in your code for file system operations, the code functions the same on either platform.

For Installation - as you are not running on a production system just use express edition.

Ok, bearing in mind all of the above comments, I decided to use my Windows10 system. I used jre-8u821-windows-X64.exe and lucee-5.3.7.047-p10-windows-installer to setup Lucee but the installation fails to start Lucee and after a minute or so gives a timeout for tomcat. Looking in services, I can’t see either Lucee or Tomcat.

The Lucee Installer ships its own JAVA und picks it up to run Lucee/Tomcat. You don’t need to install the jre-8u821-windows-X64.exe then, BUT you would need that jre-8u821-windows-X64.exe in case you want to run for example Lucee Express.

The Lucee installer is typically used to setup Lucee with IIS connectors and the whole stuff needed to run Lucee behind IIS. This isn’t very tipical on a development machine with windows 10, because the whole Windows 10 setup varies from e.g. a Windows Server 2019 OS. But still you can use it on Windows 10 to learn how Lucee runs and behaves with IIS. Is that what you want?

  • If yes: Did you also add IIS to your Windows 10? What does the catalina logfile show in /path-to-lucee/tomcat/logs ?

  • if no IIS on windows 10 is whished, and you just want to run Lucee to experiment cfml, then use CommandBox. It’s the easiest and most portable way to run Lucee out of a wwwroot.

First decide, then post back. We will help you to get this running just the way you want.

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If you want something close to what We use for production on the desktop but don’t want to hassle with Virtual Machines or containers…

Download XAMPP
Download the lucee.jar file and install it for tomcat

optionally install Notepadd++ or Visual Studio Code

Thanks, but pardon my ignorance. You’re suggesting I download and install XAMPP and, assuming I have installed Tomcat, I should install the lucee.jar file. As I have not installed Tomcat, where should I get it from?

I’ve published a video tutorial a couple of years ago:

Hi Alan,

there have been plenty of good advices already. If you still want to setup your windows 10 almost like a Windows Server 2019 OS with IIS running in front, you can use the video series from the Lucee docs as a guide. I’ve just checked it, and it’s very similar. The biggest difference is how you add the “IIS feature” to your Windows 10. To add the “IIS Feature” on Windows 10, do the following steps:

  1. Click on “Windows”-Icon in the left bottom corner
  2. Click on “Settings”-Icon
  3. Click on “Apps”
  4. Click on “Optional Features”
  5. Click on “More Windows Features” (this can be at the bottom of the page or at the right top side)
  6. Select “Internet Information Services” and install them
  7. Check if IIS is running by opening a page at http://localhost
  8. Then follow the instruction from Step 2 of this video guide, from there it’s almost the same.

Xampp comes with Tomcat as part of the package.

@Terry_Whitney I never knew/heard about that XAMPP approach for Windows. Sounds really interesting. I’ll also look into that as soon as I can, just because I’ve never tried it. Thanks for pointing that out Terry!!!

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@Terry_Whitney how do you configure Tomcats server.xml, web.xml in XAMP? Do you do it all manually? Do you also add all the reverse proxy_pass stuff/or AJP manually to Apache2s httpd.config?

In Xampp control you can click “config” and select to edit tomcat or anything else to your liking.

The most basic configuration you would add the following to httpd.conf if you want to bind it to port 80 vs port 8888

#######

LoadModule modcfml_module modules/mod_cfml.so
CFMLHandlers “.cfm .cfc .cfml”
ModCFML_SharedKey “YOURSECRETKEYREPLACETHISVALUE”
LogHeaders false
LogHandlers false
LogAliases false
VDirHeader false

####use 127.0.0.1 its faster than windows name space binding ####

ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPassMatch ^/(.+.cf[cm])(/.)?$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/$1$2
ProxyPassMatch ^/(.+.cfml)(/.
)?$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/$1$2
# optional mappings
ProxyPassMatch ^/flex2gateway/(.)$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/flex2gateway/$1
ProxyPassMatch ^/messagebroker/(.
)$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/messagebroker/$1
ProxyPassMatch ^/flashservices/gateway(.)$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/flashservices/gateway$1
ProxyPassMatch ^/openamf/gateway/(.
)$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/openamf/gateway/$1
ProxyPassMatch ^/rest/(.*)$ http://127.0.0.1:8888/rest/$1
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8888/

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Here are a lot of different options listed here for how to get started with Lucee.

My feeling is that by far the simplest method to get a Lucee server running is as @gunnar.lieb suggested and use CommandBox:

CommandBox (ortussolutions.com)

andreas, apologies for the delayed response, distracted by some health issues but I’m back into it now!. I followed your instructions here and then the video guide but I end up in the same place. In setup, installing Lucee (5.3.7.047) and “please wait while Setup installs Lucee on your computer”, I get a popup saying “error starting service Lucee” and checking Services, I can find no Lucee service. Tomcat is there on manual start and I can start it. Is there a log somewhere which might provide a reason?

Even more! After a while, the popup becomes “Timeout waiting for Tomcat to start” even though it is running. Clicking OK to that I then get “Problem running post-install step. Installation may not complete correctly Error setting passwords for Lucee admins. (did the service start?)”

All good! Glad you are back!

This is the right service

Yes, take a look at the catalinal logs at
Path-to-Lucee-installation/tomcat/logs/
You may find some important information there.

If Tomcat/Lucee doesn’t start at all, its very possible you have some permission issues (did you run the Lucee installer as administrator?) or maybe one of the ports Tomcat uses is already blocked by another running application. To verify that, check if port 8005, port 8009 or port 8888 are not being used by another application. To do that you can use a tcp connection viewer like tcpView from sysinternals/Microsoft. Check it before you start the Tomcat/Lucee service.