I’ve finally posted my instructions for getting ColdFusion 9 up and running on VirtualBox! It took me a few times to work through the process and get everything working (and documented) and at one point I forgot the password on the VM image and had to start over again. Oooops.
Documentation is now on my wiki: VirtualBox and ColdFusion 9
What will you end up with? A ‘virtual’ server running Apache/ColdFusion 9/MySQL. Using VirtualBox’s shared directories you can access your code on the guest system. This seemed to be the most simple and flexible way to configure things. In my example I’m sharing the CFEclipse workspace directory but if you are using something different it should be easy to adjust to your configuration.
You could certainly run a GUI version of Ubuntu and install an IDE so you would have a self-contained development environment but with this example I wanted to create a system I could use at work and at home for various projects but not necessarily share the code and settings between them.
If you try this and run into any issues with the documentation – please contact me with corrections!
Possibly Related:
The ColdFusion 9 on VirtualBox by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Heh, wanted to write the same walk-through this weekend after (finally) getting it to work properly :)
Thanks for sharing!
Jim, Could please you do an entry of how you are using shared folders for this vmi?
Jim – Reading your walk through, I see it mentions Shared Folders so I’ll try that. Something else, have you looked into using Ubuntu JeOS. It is what I am using to build a railo, apache, resin vm. Pretty light and specifically for vms.
I just did a quick screencast explaining how I set that up: VirtualBox Virtual Directories Explained
Let me know if that answers your questions! :)
JeOS looks very cool! I may give that a shot – but I wonder if it will work with CF9? I may also tinker with one of the really lightweight distros like DamnSmallLinux…
Thanks for the screencast. I’ll take a look tonight. I got a shared drive to work with a slightly different command then on your wiki.
I tried DSL but didn’t get very far. I wanted it light weight and with a gui so I followed http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspo.....nimal.html
I am not sure if JeOS will with CF9 but my guess is yes.
I did a pretty detailed writeup on building a Microsoft WIndows Server 2003 virtual machine (because that’s what is in production). I would have preferred to have the CFML mounted *from* the guest using a share from the host, as you did. However, I couldn’t make Apache 2.2 for Windows happy when setting a document root or alias to a UNC or mapped drive. I assume you didn’t have any trouble mounting a VirtualBox shared folder and pointing Apache to it. The workaround I settled on was to shared a path from the guest and mount it on the host, from which I use Eclipse, Subversion, and whathaveyou.
I assumed that VirtualBox shared folders were just local SMB. I’ll have to look into that further.