ColdFusion Archive files, also known as CARs, are a great feature in the CF administrator that sometimes sneaks under the radar.   There are several blog posts out there that are much better at explaining how they work and how to use them so I won’t rehash those and will put links to them here.  The 1000ft view and quick summary, at least how I use them, is that you can easily migrate the server settings from one server to another.

Learn some more about CARs.

https://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_package_and_deploy.cfm

https://www.cfguide.io/coldfusion-administrator/packaging-deployment-coldfusion-archives/

https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2017/10/did-you-know-the-coldfusion-archives-car-feature-is-now-in-standard-as-well-as-enterprise/

So what is the gotcha?  You’ve packaged up your server settings and you go over to your new server and browse to your CAR file and click Deploy.  Then nothing happens.  The page refreshes and you don’t see anything.  You go to the settings pages you tried to migrate and they are empty.  So you must have done something wrong right?  You go back and try again and still nothing.  Now you are at the point of thinking CARs don’t work.  Or you already have figured out the gotcha that is going on.

You try to deploy the CAR again and notice something flash in the upper right.  The CAR deploy process uses a popup window and if you have your blocker on then nothing is going to happen but a screen refresh and then a little icon letting you know it happened that you may not notice.  I will caveat that I am on Google Chrome when I ran into this.  So if this happens to you make sure to look for that popup blocker notification and click to allow popups from the CF administrator.  Once you do that you will get the deployment wizard come up and be able to step through the process.  Then you’ll know the joy of easily migrating you server settings from one box to another.