Experimental Features

There are a few experimental features in Runwar that are available for your servers.

Resource Manager Logging

CommandBox uses a custom resource manager in Undertow to resolve "real" paths (relative) in the servlet context with the path on the file system (absolute). This includes log concerning where the root of the WAR is, where the CF engine web root is, and any web aliases. If you enable a --debug or --trace server start, it is possible to get additional low-level information in the logs about every single file path that is resolved through the servlet context's resource manager. This logging is disabled by default since it is quite verbose.

server set runwar.args="--resource-manager-logging=true"

Or in the server.json as:

{
  "runwar" : {
    "args" : "--resource-manager-logging=true"
  }
}

Case Sensitivity of Web Server

By default, the web server in CommandBox will follow the case sensitivity of the underlying file system. So, when on Windows /FiLe.TxT will still load an actual file called /file.txt. But on Linux, the case in the browser would need to match that of the file system. CommandBox allows you to force case sensitivity to be ON or OFF for a server, overriding the server's file system.

Note, this controls all access of static file, such as images, js, css, txt, etc as well as the initial lookup of .cfm files. It will also affect all internal usage of ServletContext.getRealPath( "/myPath.txt" ). It will NOT affect CFML file operations such as <CFFile>, <CFDirectory>, fileRead(), directoryList(), etc. It will also not affect core CF engine functionality such as creating CFCs or cfincluding CFM templates. Any code directly accessing the file system will use the file systems case sensitivity. And creating CFC instance is never case sensitive in CFML.

Forcing Case sensitivity

To force CommandBox's web server to be case sensitive, even on operating systems like Windows, use the following setting. There is a nominal performance benifit in doing this and can allow a Windows CommandBox server to mimic a Linux server for testing.

server set runwar.args="--case-sensitive-web-server=true"

{
  "runwar" : {
    "args" : "--case-sensitive-web-server=true"
  }
}

Forcing Case Insensitivity

To force CommandBox's web server to be case insensitive, even on operating systems like Linux, use the following setting. There is a nominal performance overhead in doing this and can allow a Linux CommandBox server to mimic a Windows IIS server. In this mode, CommandBox will use an internal cache of file system lookups to improve performance. If there are two files of the same name using different case, then you will get whatever file is found first.

server set runwar.args="--case-sensitive-web-server=false"

{
  "runwar" : {
    "args" : "--case-sensitive-web-server=false"
  }
}

Cache Servlet Paths

You can activate a cache for all file path resolution in the resource manager by activating this setting. This is only for production and will eliminate repeated file system hits by your CF engine, such as checking for an Application.cfc file on every request, or testing where the servlet context root is. This will NOT affect any of the CFML fileRead() sort of commands or any code in the CF engine that bypasses the ServletContext and directly hits the file system. The default is false.

server set runwar.args="--cache-servlet-paths=true"

{
  "runwar" : {
    "args" : "--cache-servlet-paths=true"
  }
}

Standard Adobe ColdFusion installations have a similar cache of "real" paths from the servlet context that is tied to a setting in the administrator called "Cache Webserver paths" but that setting is not available and does not work on CommandBox servers for some reason..

Custom Log Pattern

The Java logging library Log4j is used for servers' log files and console logs. The default logging pattern is:

[%-5p] %c: %m%n

You can customize this with any valid Log4j pattern layout, which you can find here:

This would put the date/time into every log message:

server set runwar.args='--log-pattern "[%-5p] %d{dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS} %c: %m%n"'

This would log ONLY the message with no severity or category:

server set runwar.args='--log-pattern "%m%n"'

Note, the color coding of log lines in CommandBox is dependent upon the default Log4j pattern layout.

Disable Resource Manager Change Listener

There is an XNIO file system watcher started for the web root and any virtual directories in your server. This change listener serves two purposes:

• Cache invalidation for the servlet path lookup matching

• Cache invalidation for welcome file lookups

In normal operations you should have no issues with this, but it has been observed starting a server in a web root with a very large number of files (like over 200,000) can consume a lot of resources, and even cause out of memory errors. The change listener in Undertow can be disabled with this setting:

server set runwar.args='--resource-manager-file-system-watcher=false'