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Chapter 5: Web Server Management
You can connect Adobe ColdFusion to the built-in web server and to external web servers, such as Apache, IIS, and
Sun ONE Web Server (formerly known as iPlanet).
About web servers in ColdFusion
The web server is a critical component in your ColdFusion environment, and understanding how ColdFusion interacts
with web servers can help you administer your site. ColdFusion provides the following web server options:
Built-in web server
A Coyote is Tomcat's HTTP Connector component that supports the HTTP 1.1 protocol for the
web server or application container. Coyote listens for incoming connections on a specific TCP port on the server and
forwards the request to the Tomcat Engine. Tomcat Engine processes the request and send back a response to the
requesting client. For more information, see “
Using the built-in web server
” on page 95.
External web server
A customized web server connector module that forwards requests for ColdFusion pages from an
external web server to ColdFusion. For more information, see “
Using an external web server
” on page 96.
Using the built-in web server
The ColdFusion server configuration is built on top of Tomcat, also called the built-in web server. The built-in web
server is useful in the following cases:
Coexistence/transition
The built-in web server lets you run a previous version of ColdFusion (using an external web
server) and ColdFusion (using the built-in web server) on the same computer while you migrate your existing
applications to ColdFusion.
Development
If your workstation runs ColdFusion but does not run an external web server, you can still develop and
test ColdFusion applications locally through the built-in web server.
All web servers listen on a TCP/IP port, which you can specify in the URL. By default, web servers listen for HTTP
requests on port 80 (for example, http://www.adobe.com and http://www.adobe.com:80 are the same). Similarly, port
443 is the default port for https requests.
By default in the server configuration, the built-in web server listens on port 8500. For example, to access the
ColdFusion Administrator through the built-in web server, specify
http://
servername
:8500/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm.
Note:
URLs are case sensitive on UNIX operating systems.
If you enable the built-in web server during the installation process and the port is already in use, the installer
automatically finds the next-highest available port and configures the built-in web server to use that port. To
determine the port number used by the built-in web server, open the
cf_root
/runtime/conf/server.xml file in a text
editor and examine the
port
attribute of the connector. For example,
<Connector port="8504"
protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol>
.