Oi, another lovely thing with Vista was getting my development environment working with CF and Apache. This is getting to be humorous on all the little things that is going wrong with Vista.

OK, couple of things to read:

A very good Apache 2.2.4 and ColdFusion problem and resolution article

Adobe Tech Note on Apache

There are a couple of things that you have to do differently with Vista or, perhaps it was not noted in these articles.

First, Apache Restarts / Stops / Starts appear to have be run with Administrator privileges. To do this, while in the “All Programs” right click on the Apache short cuts, and select them to be “run as administrator”. I am not sure why I have to run these as administrator, but it could have something to do with the Services being installed with Administrator Privileges (see my last blog post).

I couldn’t figure out a way to rename the wsconfig file as mentioned in the Adobe tech note. That said, Vista has a pretty good restore feature for previous versions of files (almost like a mini subversion). I copied over the file, and then reverted to make sure. You just right click and chose “Restore to previous version”. Each time the version changed via the cmd line check. Perhaps this was just me rushing through a step though, but I don’t see a reason to have the backup any longer.

In the Adobe tech note, there is some cmd line work that has to be installed. You need to run your cmd with Administrator privileges again. Again, I am not sure why, but it is the only way I could get it to stick.

If you are not using the htdocs, do not uncomment the line in the httpconfig for vhosts as suggested in the Cutter’s Crossing Article. Perhaps, I don’t understand completely what this does, but with a different web root configured, I ended up getting 403’s.

You will need to run the Server tool as well as mentioned. You will need to delete and then add Apache again. Make sure you do the “Advance Settings” as you need to point to httpd.exe again.

Other than that, it seemed to work just fine on Vista.

A little bit of a pain, but not nearly the pain I had with IIS and CF (only using Apache now).