If you’re new to ColdFusion, the biggest challenge most individuals have is getting ColdFusion setup and running on their local machine. This tutorial will walk you through the process and get you to the point that you can begin your development journey.
When this tutorial is finished, you will have IIS running on your Windows machine and ColdFusion installed and configured to process your ColdFusion Development code.
First things first… let’s get IIS installed. (what is IIS? IIS is Microsoft Internet Information Services – Basically the Web Server that will serve your content over the web (or port 80).
Note: if you already have IIS, you can skip this step and go to Step 2. To see if you already have IIS installed, do this:
Step 1. Check and/or Install IIS on your local machine.
Click Start (the little windows icon on the lower left) > and type “IIS”. If you see the screen below and no application, then you do not.
If you see the screen above, then you do not have IIS, so we will need to get it installed. So let’s clear out the IIS text you entered and replace it with programs as you see below and click on the “Add or Remove Programs” option at the top of the list:
Next, let’s scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen in the window and click on the Programs and Features option as seen below:
That will low a new window, on the left side of the window you will see “Turn Windows features on or off”. Click that!
Now you are the area of Windows that allows you to install additional features into your machine… the option you are looking for is Internet Information Services (or IIS).
If you expand that option you will see 3 sub-items under it.
For the purposes of this tutorial you need to expand the Web Management Tools and World Wide Services and select all the options inside of them as follows:
Then click on “OK” it will go through all the things it needs (if might prompt you to use Windows Update to download files needed, let it). When it’s all finished close all the windows and go back to the desktop. Then click start and type in IIS (like we did when we started this) and now you should see IIS as an application on the machine. (see below). That means it’s installed and ready to go (all it needs now is ColdFusion!)
Step 2. Download ColdFusion 2018
Next you have to get a copy of ColdFusion. You have two options for this.
1. Download the Latest Version of ColdFusion from Adobe’s Website.
2. You can download ColdFusion (current or older version) from CFMLREPO
(as outlined in this tutorial)
For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be going to Adobe’s website (keep in mind that they change their site all the time, so it might change since this tutorial was created. Just go and download the latest version of ColdFusion). In your browser go to: https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html
On their site, click on “Free Trial” as outlined below, this will take you
This will take you to a registration screen, fill out all the details necessary. There is an option that asks what version of ColdFusion you want to download. For the purposes of this tutorial we will select Windows 64 Bit English. (but you’re free to select a different option if one suits your needs better).
Then when you’re done at the bottom of the page click the download button. This will download the ColdFusion installation file. (keep in mind that the file is pretty large.. 900+MB so it might take a bit! Go get a coffee and a donut and come back!)…
Step 3. Install ColdFusion 2018
Double-Click on the ColdFusion installation file. This will prompt you to allow administrator access as seen below:
Click Yes, then let the installation software get situated:
Let the installer run to 100%…. that will load the ColdFusion installation wizard on the right.
Accept the terms of the software and click Next.
Next, comes the licensing screen… here for development you can select either the 30 day trial (this is a 30 day enterprise license) or you can select the developer edition. The difference between the two at a high level is the number of requests you can do to the local server from different visitor ip’s. Since you are installing on a local development machine the Developer edition would be just fine.
Next screen, let’s select Server Configuration and click Next.
Next, let’s select a server profile. For development machine select “Development Profile” and click Next.
Next, select the sub-components.. When i am working on a local development environment I tend to leave them all on (as I don’t know what I’ll need later, but in production you’d only install what is absolutely necessary). For the purposes of this tutorial, leave all the options checked and click Next.
Next, screen will ask you for remote component credentials. the default username is “admin”. You can change it if you’d like or leave it as is… then enter and confirm your password. Then click next.
For the next screen, this defines if you would like to access services remotely… since this is a development environment leave it off and click Next.
Next, the wizard wishes to know where to actually install ColdFusion on your machine. The default path is fine.
The next screen asks on what port do you want the built-in ColdFusion server to run on.. the default is 8500. You can leave this setting as is, unless you have something else running on that port already. Then click Next.
The next screen is for performance monitoring tools… You can leave the value local to your development environment or put localhost or 127.0.0.1. Then click Next.
The next screen will prompt you to enter in the ColdFusion administrator password. Make this something you will remember as you will use this area quite a bit in your development. This is the administration area where you connect databases, configure mappings, turn on debug and more… Type in and confirm your password and click Next.
The next screen will prompt you for a password for RDS. This is ColdFusion’s Remote Development System. Basically ColdFusion gives you the ability to connect behind the scenes with your coding editor to get live database connections and server settings. I will be discussing this in a later tutorial, but for now enter in a password (same or different as before) and click Next.
After you’re done with that, next the installer will ask is if you’d like to turn on server updates. I usually leave it on and click Next.
That gets us to the final screen in the installer which will show you all the things you defined… double check them and click “Install”.
Let the installer do it’s thing (another Donut?) Note that you might get prompted to allow Java access, if you do then click “Allow Access”
When it’s done it will bring up a screen to tell you it’s done.
Click on Done, it should open a browser window that will take you to the ColdFusion administrator. If it does not, open up your web browser and go to: http://127.0.0.1:8500/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm
When the browser page loads, it will prompt you for a password that you entered in Graphic 3.12 above. Type the password in and click “login”.
Let it do it’s thing for a bit… then you will see this screen:
Step 4. Configure ColdFusion to Talk to IIS
We have everything installed… next we need to configure the connectors so ColdFusion runs under IIS. To do this, click start and expand the Adobe folder. Then open the “Web Server Configuration Tool” as seen below.
You will see a window like the one below; which basically states that nothing is configured yet. Click on the “add” button.
The following window outlines you are wanting to configure your localhost machine, using the IIS server. No need to change anything, just click “OK”.
The configuration screen will prompt you that it will need to restart IIS. Click Yes.
When it’s done, you will see the same window as before, but this time it will show you that IIS is configured to run ColdFusion.
Step 5. Testing that it works…
To test that everything worked, let’s create a simple ColdFusion template called “test.cfm” and save it to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\
<cfset isThisWorking = "Yes, It's Working!" />
<cfoutput>
#isThisWorking#
</cfoutput>Now in a browser, go to: http://127.0.0.1/test.cfm (if it all worked, you should see this)
And that concludes this tutorial… if you run into problems or need further help let us know.
Welcome to the exciting world of ColdFusion and soon you will be building some amazing things! We look forward to seeing them!
EasyCFM.COM 
I’ve walked through the steps but I cannot open CFM pages. I am receiving “The requested content appears to be script and will not be served by the static file handler.” error message. It looks like some handlers are missing?
Sounds like a step might have been missed, particularly with one of the ISAPI settings… did you get it?