Install

Just tried to install multiple Cold Fusion 2023 instances programmatically by a coldfusion script and the setup failed after a few seconds with the following error message:

I received a hotfix for "serverinstance.cfc" from Adobe Support.

• 21.07.2023: Hotfix is available via support. Should be fixed in Updater 5+
• 11.07.2023: Opened case with support "CF2023: "The rootdir method was not found" when creating multiple instances".

We just installed Windows 2016 CORE. As recommened you typically should install all available Windows Updates before you move forward and install other software.

When we started to install Commvault File Agent and Virtual Server Agent setup failed with errors in eventlog and never completed. If you search Application event log you will find two errors logged:

Log Name: Application
Source: .NET Runtime
Date: 8/3/2017 3:59:44 PM
Event ID: 1026
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: HOST1.example.local
Description:
Application: setup.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception

You may need to install updates via command line. This at least is a major requirement if you run ColdFusion in a locked down environment with limited permissions. In this case the ColdFusion instance runs with a specified windows user account that has very limited permissions on the local system. The user ColdFusion runs under will not be a member of Administrators group. In this case you are unable to run automatic updates via ColdFusion Administrator. The updates will silently fail and the update notification will just not get away in ColdFusion Administrator.

Analysis has shown that the update log has problem in renaming the coldfusion.exe file. This at least happens for Updater 12 if you had no other updates installed. It may be possible that the updates succeed, if this file is not going to be replaced. The root cause of this issue is that the ColdFusion Service user has no Administrator permissions and only Administrators can stop and start Windows services.

If you need to install ColdFusion on Windows you may have the need to create instances by command line script. I have found some Linux bash examples in the Adobe forums, but nobody shared any script for Windows and these Linux versions cannot used. I had the need to write this scripts for Windows Core installation that is a bit more challenging than a GUI based installation, but the many benefits of a core installation out-weight the required work. I'm sharing these script here and hope these is of help for you getting these annoying tasks automated.

You need to prepare yourself first to use the script. As first step you need to get the cfadminPassword and this requires some debugging.

Like me you may need to deploy Fonts in your Enterpise network via Active Directory.

In past we have seen some tools on the net that made this Font installation an easy task, but all of them have faded away or have been commerialized with questionable feature lists in basic payed version. It took me an unacceptable hard time to find the way to go as the search results give tons of bad results and none of these tools around is really easy to use. I wished I would have found a GUI tool that works like drag and drop, browse registry and other stuff to create at least easy type setups, but this seems only to be a very big wish. After some weeks with MSI and WiX I understand more and more that such a tool cannot be easy - except it would be very limited in functionality and what is more worse than using 5 tools in a long term view? In a small world you may only need a Font installer, but later you need much more and it's better to learn MSI and WiX the hard way. You cannot get around if you need to deploy software in daily business.