This is the second of my posts about working with ColdFusion and Tomcat. You can read the first post here.

When using JRun as the underlying JEE servlet container for ColdFusion, you get the advantage of "wsconfig"; the Web Server Configuration Tool.

This connecter  is a little JAR file which effectively handles all the fun and games of hooking up ColdFusion with your web server. When you use a different servlet container, in our case Tomcat, you need get your hands dirty.

SIDE NOTE: With the next release of ColdFusion using Tomcat under the hood, I think it would be fairly safe to assume that the ColdFusion team will create a version of wsconfig to handle the configuration like it does now.

There are a number of ways to handle the communication between the web server and ColdFusion, and I'm going to concentrate here on how we do it using Apache. The obvious method that comes to mind is mod_proxy, but for a variety of reasons we're going to look at the AJP connector instead.

You'll most likely find that your Apache installation will already have mod_proxy_ajp enabled, but you can double check by opening up your httpd.conf file and searching for the proxy module, or by looking for a proxy_ajp.conf file in your conf.d directory (your OS X / Linux distribution may vary).

Knowing that AJP is installed, we can now configure Apache to talk to ColdFusion via Tomcat. I have individual "conf" files for each of my Apache Virtual Hosts. As such, let's create a file in our conf.d directory called andyallan.conf Populate andyallan.conf with:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName dev.andyallan.com  

# We need to specify the Document Root as we are only proxying .cf* files to Tomcat, therefore keeping

# all static files served by Apache 

DocumentRoot /opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.11/webapps/cfusion/andyallan/wwwroot  

DirectoryIndex index.cfm

<Location />

     Order allow,deny

     Allow from All

</Location>

# Only allow proxing from 127.0.0.1

<Proxy *>

     Order Deny,Allow

     Deny from all

     Allow from 127.0.0.1

</Proxy>

# We need the ProxyPreserveHost if we are using multiple VHosts

ProxyPreserveHost On

# Only Proxy .cfc and .cfm files 

ProxyPassMatch ^/(.+\.cf[cm])(/.*)?$ ajp://localhost:8009/cfusion/andyallan/wwwroot/$1$2#      

# Need these two lines to maintain sessions

ProxyPassReverseCookieDomain / /       

ProxyPassReverseCookiePath / /

# Configure logging

ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/andyallan-error.log       

CustomLog /var/log/httpd/andyallan-access.log common

</VirtualHost>

To test that I can now access my site dev.andyallan.com without worrying about context roots, ports, etc, I simply drop an entry into my local hosts file and then fire the URL up in my browser.

Using a proxy will mess up some CGI variables and I'll touch on them in the next post.

For more information on AJP and the various proxy rules, check out:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy_ajp.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html