ColdFusion 9, Tomcat 7, Apache and vhosts

Question

I've successfully managed to install CF9 (war) in Tomcat 7, linking the two via Apache vhosts. I'm using ajp to proxy .cfm requests, and other rewrite urls to Tomcat 7 with Apache serving the rest of the content.

However, each vhost needs its own copy of the ColdFusion WEB-INF in the vhost root. This works fine, but it has the side affect of each cf site having a unique instance of CF. The mappings, DSNs and all other settings are custom and not shared between the CF sites.

I'd really like to combine each WEB-INF so that they're is just one for my entire dev setup, kinda like how JRun4 used to work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible with Tomcat as we have two separate instances and both separate installation files.

Answer 2

Have you tried replicating the virtual hosts in Tomcat also? I found this on the Tomcat wiki which sounds like it answers your question.

http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/CreateVirtualHosts

Answer 3

Scott, I know this is an old thread. Did you manage to make it work, or even, is this still relevant? I was trying to do the same and found that you could make a symlink to the original ColdFusion context's META-INF and WEB-INF instead of copying the entire directory structures. Just remember to add allowLinking="true" in the <Host> tag in Tomcat's server.xml. So:

ln -s /path/to/tomcat/webapps/cfusion/META-INF /path/to/yourhost1/META-INF

ln -s /path/to/tomcat/webapps/cfusion/WEB-INF /path/to/yourhost1/WEB-INF

ln -s /path/to/tomcat/webapps/cfusion/META-INF /path/to/yourhost2/META-INF

ln -s /path/to/tomcat/webapps/cfusion/WEB-INF /path/to/yourhost2/WEB-INF

Basically all virtual hosts are indeed Java applications, but they share the same ColdFusion engine and ColdFusion meta-data so the DSN is shared across all hosts.

Now I'm not sure if above is a good practice, break anything, or worst, make kittens sad.

Any feedback is welcome.