I wish everyone a very happy and prosperous new year. Here comes the first blog post for the year 2015, on ColdFusion Buider 3. A user came across our Mobile Application Development Contest blog and was trying to develop his application using ColdFusion Builder 3, but he wasn’t able to setup a connection between ColdFusion 11 and ColdFusion Builder 3.  He was trying to create a “Remote Server” connection between ColdFusion Builder 3 and ColdFusion 11, installed on separate servers (distributed setup). 

Here are the steps that will help you setup a remote host with ColdFusion Builder:-

1.     Launch ColdFusion Builder 3 and choose your workspace.

2.     Right-click on the “CF Servers” view and select 

3.    Select “New server configuration” and click “OK”. You can choose “Import configurations from RDS server”, in case you have RDS server setup already and want to use existing server information.

4.     If you can’t locate the CF Servers, then, follow the screenshot below, to enable it.

Refer to Add a remote server and fill in the details for your server.

5.     General Settings

a)     Server Name: ColdFusion server name.

b)     Description: (optional) Description of the server.

c)     Application Server: Select the drop-down list and select CF+ Tomcat Bundle (for CF10/CF11)

d)     Host Name: Name of the remote server host.

e)     Select: Is Remote.

Note: When you enter a Host Name other than localhost or 127.0.0.1, Is Remote is automatically selected.

f)     Webserver Port: Specify the port number of the remote ColdFusion server instance you are configuring. You can refer server.xml for the same at ColdFusion11cfusionruntimeconf.

g)     RDS User Name: (optional) if you are using RDS, specify the RDS user name.

h)      RDS Password: (optional) Specify the RDS password.

Click Next to move to the next screen.

6.     Remote Server Settings

a)     User Name: Specify the CF Admin username.

b)     Password: Specify the CF Admin password.

Click Next to move to the next screen.

7.     Install Extensions

Select Install Extensions to install the extensions that are packaged with ColdFusion Builder.

a)     Browse and select the ColdFusion web root location.

b)     Browse and select the ColdFusion web root location on the remote ColdFusion server.

c)     Browse to a location within the web root to install the extensions. The extensions are installed in the Extensions directory within the selected location.

8.    Click Finish to add the remote ColdFusion server instance. You can right-click on the remote server and access the ColdFusion Administrator of the remote server.

This blog post talks about, the minimal settings required to setup a remote server for CF Builder. You can skip the Install Extensions section as well.

Note: – While configuring the remote server in CF Builder, ensure that, you are able to access/ping the remote ColdFusion server outside builder. You can probably, access the remote CF Admin in the browser, for e.g. http://ip:port/CFIDE/Administrator/index.cfm and ensure connectivity.