How-to integrate ColdFusion and MAMP to run on your local server.

Tutorials November 10, 2009

After many hours of frustration not knowing why I failed to get ColdFusion running in my developers environment I came across the entry of Mike Jones on Configuring ColdFusion & MAMP Pro.

Following his screen cast plus using the comments to his post resulted in a working installation! Thank you Mike, this saved my day:

The following points are important:

• follow his screen cast.
• You need MAMP Pro, the free MAMP version does not have http config template files which will need to be modified and protected from being overwritten at a later time when launching the server.
• The video covers ColdFusion8. Use the same version to ensure you can follow along easily and with no surprises.
• Install the 32-bit version - the default OSX version - and NOT the 64-bit version, even if your computer can run this. It is MAMP which needs the 32-bit version [true as of June 2009].
• The screen cast refers to the living-e directory within the Application Support folder - that folder now is called appsolute [as of November 2009]
• After the ColdFusion8 install and configuration you need to fix MANUALLY what Adobe got wrong. You will need to replace the installed mod_jrun.20.so file (which is the 64-bit version for some reason) with the 32-bit file which you get as follows:
  1. Don’t double-click but un-zip the file Applications/ColdFusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig.jar
  2. The file you want is Applications/ColdFusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/connectors/apache/intel-macos/prebuilt/mod_jrun.20.so
  3. Replace the existing file with this extracted one.
• Re-starting within MAMP at the end did not work for me, I had to quit MAMP and relaunch and then all was fine.

As a developer it is really handy to have ColdFusion running on your own machine. Good luck!