Traditional CommandBox servers have only a single web root and if you want to start up two separate sites, then you start two CommandBox servers which creates two separate Java processes. This may be cumbersome or even untenable if you have hundreds site separate sites you want to run as the overhead of the JVMs would require too much memory.

CommandBox can also use a popular standard called ModCFML which allows it to behave like an Adobe ColdFusion Tomcat-based installation, which you can set behind a web server and CF will pull the webroots dynamically from the web server, allowing any number of separate sites to all be run on a single JVM instance.

What is ModCFML?

ModCFML takes it's name from the convention of Apache modules, which are named mod_xyz and is really more of a standard implemented by several different libraries. The way ModCFML works, is the front-end web server (IIS, Apache, Nginx, etc) passes a few custom HTTP headers to the back end CF server on each request that tells the CF server where the web root lives for that site. Here's an overview of the related libraries:

• BonCode - Boncode is an AJP proxy for IIS which can be configured globally or on a per-site basis to proxy requests to a back-end CF server. Boncode automatically sends the ModCFML HTTP headers. Docs here.

• Apache mod_cfml module - This module can be installed into Apache HTTPd server to create an AJP reverse proxy. Docs here.

• Tomcat ModCFML Valve - This Tomcat valve creates contexts in Tomcat for the incoming ModCFML Headers. Since you're using CommandBox, you don't need this since CommandBox has support for the equivalent behavior built in!

• CommandBox - CommandBox will obey the standard ModCFML HTTP headers so long as ModCFML.enable is set to true for the server.

• Nginx or other web servers - Even though there is no native ModCFML module for Nginx, you can still use it by just setting the necessary HTTP headers manually! More on this below.

Set Up

This is the minimum needed to configure ModCFML for any front-end web server in CommandBox:

server set ModCFML.enable=true
server set ModCFML.sharedKey=my-secret
server set web.ajp.enable=true web.ajp.port=8009

That's it! The default web root for the server will be whatever folder you start the CommandBox sever in, but that default web root will only be used if a requests reaches CommandBox which doesn't contain the special ModCFML HTTP headers.

Next you'll need to install BonCode (if using IIS) or mod_cfml (if using Apache) and configure it with the same shared key for security. The web server doesn't need to be on the same server as CommandBox, but CommandBox's AJP port does need to be accessible to the web server and the port numbers need to match. 8009 is the default AJP port, but it's not a requirement.

Configuration

Here are some additional ModCFML settings you may want to tweak:

maxContexts

This limits the number of contexts which can be created to prevent a malicious client from causing a DOS from a huge number of contexts, which would eventually begin consuming memory. Default is 200.

requireSharedKey

Set this to false FOR DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES ONLY to not require the shared key header to be present. This may simplify your local setup, but do NOT enable this on any externally-accessible web server as a malicious client could send their own HTTP headers and serve content from anywhere on your server's hard drive! Default is true.

Unsupported Configuration

Here are some settings you may be familiar with in the Tomcat valve, that CommandBox does NOT use.

timeBetweenContexts

CommandBox does NOT have a corresponding setting for timeBetweenContexts **** since Undertow is VERY fast to add new contexts.

scanClassPaths

CommandBox does NOT have a corresponding setting for scanClassPaths **** because it re-uses the existing class loader and cloned Undertow deployment from the default context so no jars at all need to be scanned.

loggingEnabled

CommandBox does NOT have a corresponding setting for loggingEnabled. There is already logging as part of Runwar and the --debug flag when you start your server will automatically log additional bits.

responseCode

CommandBox does NOT have a corresponding setting for responseCode **** because it is capable of adding the new context entirely on the fly and using it immediately without needing to re-send the request.

What about Nginx, etc?

You can use any front end web server you like so long as you manually set the HTTP headers that ModCFML requires. Here they are:

• X-ModCFML-SharedKey - Needs to match the ModCFML.sharedKey in your server.json

• X-Tomcat-DocRoot - Needs to contain the absolute path to the web root for the current virtual host

• X-Webserver-Context - Optional. Will be used instead of hostname to group multiple hostnames into a single context

• X-VDirs - A string representing the aliases (virtual directories) of the web server for CommandBox to auto-create in the servlet in the format: /foo,C:\path\to\foo;/bar,C:\path\to\bar

• X-VDirs-SharedKey - Must also contain the same value as X-ModCFML-SharedKey or X-VDirs will be ignored. This is for security since the older mod_cfml Apache proxies don't override a missing X-VDir header, allowing malicious client to pass one. Only pass the X-VDirs-SharedKey header if your proxy is explicitly controlling the contents of the X-VDirs header.

For NGinx, setting the headers would look like this and would need configured for each site.

proxy_set_header X-Tomcat-DocRoot /path/to/site/www;
proxy_set_header X-ModCFML-SharedKey SHARED-KEY-HERE;

It is not required to use an AJP proxy. CommandBox's ModCFML support will process the incoming HTTP headers regardless of what protocol was used to proxy the requests to it.

Debugging

How do you confirm ModCFML is working or debug when it doesn't go right? CommandBox has automatic debug and trace level messages that will appear in the console when you start your server with the --debug or --trace flag that will tell you when a new context is deployed and what the web root is.

[WARN ] Runwar: X-Tomcat-DocRoot is null or empty.  Using default context for deploymentKey [127.0.0.1].
[INFO ] Runwar: Creating deployment [site1.com] in C:\www\site1
[DEBUG] Runwar: New servlet context created for [site1.com]
[INFO ] Runwar: Creating deployment [site2.com] in C:\www\site2
[DEBUG] Runwar: New servlet context created for [site2.com]
[INFO ] Runwar: Creating deployment [site3.com] in C:\www\site3
[DEBUG] Runwar: New servlet context created for [site3.com]

Adobe vs Lucee

CommandBox's ModCFML support will work for both Adobe and Lucee servers! Keep in mind however, that Lucee and Adobe work differently under the covers, even though it looks the same from the outside. When the server is Lucee, CommandBox's ModCFML support will create a new servlet context deployment for each web context. Each servlet context will have a context root of / and will share the same class loader as the default instance, so they will also share the same server context. Adobe only uses the default servlet context, but swaps out the resource manager per-request, just like Adobe's Tomcat-based installations work. If you don't know what all that means, don't worry.

Naked ModCFML

You maybe wondering if it's possible to make use of multiple web roots in CommandBox without having any web server at all. Well, we weren't going to let you in on this, but actually YES it is possible! All you need to do is configure some Server Rules to detect the host name and set the HTTP headers and CommandBox's ModCFML will be none the wiser. You can turn off the requirement of a shared key, but make sure you have a catch-all rule that rejects requests from unknown host names.

Here is the server.json for a simple setup. Note, we're using the commandbox-hostupdater module here to auto-create hosts file mappings for our domains. We're also pointing the webroots to site1.com, site2.com, and site3.com folders inside of the default web root, but these could really point anywhere you like.

{
    "ModCFML":{
        "enable":"true",
        "requireSharedKey":"false"
    },
    "web":{
        "hostAlias":[
            "site1.com",
            "site2.com",
            "site3.com",
            "fakedomain.com"
        ],
        "rules":[
            "equals( %{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}, 'site1.com' ) -> set(attribute=%{i,X-Tomcat-DocRoot},value='${serverinfo.webroot}site1.com')",
            "equals( %{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}, 'site2.com' ) -> set(attribute=%{i,X-Tomcat-DocRoot},value='${serverinfo.webroot}site2.com')",
            "equals( %{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}, 'site3.com' ) -> set(attribute=%{i,X-Tomcat-DocRoot},value='${serverinfo.webroot}site3.com')",
            "not regex( value=%{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}, pattern='^site[123]\\.com$', case-sensitive=false ) -> set-error(401)"
        ]
    }
}

If you want something SUPER quick and dirty for local development and you TRUST the people accessing the site, you could get really clever and just have a simple convention where the host name matches a a folder inside of your default web root. Any hostnames that didn't match a real folder would just use the default web root.

{
    "ModCFML":{
        "enable":"true",
        "requireSharedKey":"false"
    },
    "web":{
        "rules":[
            "set(attribute=%{i,X-Tomcat-DocRoot},value='${serverinfo.webroot}%{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}')"
        ]
    }
}

You can specify the CFML engine via the command line arguments:

This will start an Adobe ColdFusion 2018 server in your webroot. That's it!

By default, CommandBox uses the cfengine slug to search for the engine on ForgeBox. The format is slug@version where the version is optional. Ortus Solutions maintains the versions of the engines available on ForgeBox.

Supported engines are:

• Adobe ColdFusion 9 **

• Adobe ColdFusion 10

• Adobe ColdFusion 11

• Adobe ColdFusion 2016

• Adobe ColdFusion 2018

• Adobe ColdFusion 2021

• Railo 4.2

• Lucee 4.5

• Lucee 5

Here are some examples:

Engines are downloaded and stored in your CommandBox artifacts folder. You can view your engines and clear them using the standard artifacts commands:

ColdFusion Admin settings

While Lucee asks for a password the first time running the admin, ColdFusion requires a username and password when CommandBox sets it up. The default username and password for the Adobe ColdFusion servers used are:

• Username: admin

• Password: commandbox

WAR Support

Additionally, CommandBox can start any WAR given to it using the WARPath argument.

If you run a regular start command inside of a folder that has a /WEB-INF/web.xml file, CommandBox will treat that folder as a WAR.

Custom Engines

The cfengine parameter can accept any valid CommandBox endpoint ID. That means it can be an HTTP URL, a Git repo, a local folder path to your company's network share, or a custom ForgeBox entry you've created. As long as that endpoint resolves to a package that contains these files, you're good:

1. box.json

2. Engine.[zip|war] (file name doesn't matter)

CommandBox will download the package, unzip it and use the WAR/zip file as the engine for your app.

Normally, the artifacts cache isn't used for non-ForgeBox packages, but CommandBox will only download the engine once per server and then assume the file hasn't changed. You will need to forget the server to trigger a new download.

Here's an example of starting up a web server using a direct download link to a package containing a WAR file:

server.json Configuration

You can set the cfengine and other related configuration options in your server.json to use them every time you start your app.

These commands would create the following server.json

Just a reminder that starting a server with any command line arguments will save the arguments to your server.json by default.

This command would add adobe@9 to your server.json. If this is not what you want, you can append saveSettings=false or even --!saveSettings when you start your server and CommandBox will not save the arguments you specify to your server.json.

Remember to use Semantic Versions

One minor difference to keep in mind is Lucee server and Adobe ColdFusion use a typical versioning scheme for java projects which looks like this:

However, and use the (semver) which is slightly different. Basically the build ID is moved to the end after a plus (+) sign.

The important thing to remember is, when starting a server via CommandBox always use the second format shown above since that is how ForgeBox recognizes each release.

What versions exist?

Questions about what versions are available? No problem! Here are some ways you can find out:

• View the last few versions via the CLI with the command forgebox show lucee

• Start typing your cfengine and hit the <tab> key to invoke the tab-completion feature. This actually phones out to ForgeBox as you hit tab to get the current valid list of versions that match what you've typed so far

You can also follow the Lucee bleeding edge, which means every time you start your CommandBox server you'll get the very latest Lucee snapshot release. Please only use this for local development and not production!

Pinning Exact Version

It is a nice feature of CommandBox to have it automatically grab the latest version of your favorite CF engine every time it starts.

However, you may have good reason to NEVER want a new version automatically installed. In order to do this, you must specify a COMPLETE version number, including the build number, making sure to use the proper version format. This means you need a major, minor, patch, and build number.

Lucee Light builds on ForgeBox

We're now publishing CF Engines to ForgeBox based on the Lucee Light builds which allows you to start up a Lucee Light server. These are under a ForgeBox package named lucee-light and we've also backfilled all the same versions that exist for the normal lucee engine. Note, the three bullets points above apply to Lucee Light as well, Just replace lucee with lucee-light and you're good to go.

If you have questions about how to install extensions into a Lucee light server, please hit us up on Slack and we can show you several ways to manage that.

Sometimes you may wish to start a server on a computer that doesn't have access to the Internet. However, you may notice that running a command such as the following will throw an error trying to connect to ForgeBox:

That is because 5.x is a semver range and not a specific version. CommandBox must connect to ForgeBox to see what versions of the CF engine lucee can be found to use the latest one.

Be More Specific

If you know that a CF engine is already downloaded in your server's artifacts directory, start your server with a specific major, minor, patch, and build version to skip the ForgeBox check.

NOTE: If this fails, check the location of the folder structure below the artifacts folder for it's exact path. e.g. /artifacts/lucee/5.0.0+252/lucee.zip - The box command for this would be: start cfengine=lucee@5.0.0+252 This follows the pattern: /artifacts/[server-type]/[server-version]/[server-type].zip Useful if you've manually downloaded the file from forgebox and need to rename it.

Fail Safe

If CommandBox needs to connect to ForgeBox to resolve a version number and ForgeBox is unavailable, it will look in your local artifacts cache to try and find a cached version of that CF engine that satisfies your semver range. This means you may not get the latest version of that CF Engine, but at least your server will start up.

You may want to start up a local server that does not have a CF Engine such as Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion installed. You can do this as of CommandBox 5.1.0 by setting the cfengine parameter to none like so:

Or in your server.json like this

This server will support everything that you are used to including the server.json file, heap settings, ports, and virtual directories. The only difference is it will server everything as static files. (.cfm or .cfc files will not be processed)

One of the most useful features of CommandBox is the ability to start an ad-hoc server quickly and easily. Any folder on your hard drive can become the web root of a server. To start up the server, cd into a directory containing some CFML code, and run the start command. An available port will be chosen by default and in a few seconds, a browser window will open showing the default document (index.cfm).

To stop the embedded server, run the stop command from the same directory.

OS Integration

You can start as many embedded server instances as you want. Each running server will add an icon in your system tray with the logo of your currently running engine. Click on it for options:

• Stop Server

• Open Browser

• Open Admin

• Open File System

Open Browser

When a server finishes starting, CommandBox will automatically open up the root of the site in your default browser. You can control the URL that is opened with

You can change the browser used to open all sites or override just the browser for a single site:

Or you can disable this feature entirely

Disable the tray icon

If you don't want the tray integration, then you can turn it off in your server.json with this setting.

Or turn it off at a global level in your config settings.

Full Control

Environment Variables

Any ComandBox environment variables present in the shell will automatically be passed to the environment of the server process. This means, given an example like this:

The CFML code running that server process will be able to "see" the foo environment variable.

If a server isn't starting, the first thing to run is the server log command. It will show you the console log for that server. Note, this dumps the entire log file to the console, which may be very large. We recommend using the tail or --follow tricks below.

Tailing and Following logs

If the log is very large, use the tail command to just see the last few lines of it.

To get a live stream of the console log from a running server, use the --follow flag and the command will continue streaming new lines to the console until you press Ctrl-C to stop.

You can also look at your server's access log (if enabled) and rewrite log (if enabled).

Start server in console mode

You can use the --console flag to the server start command to start a server in the foreground. The console log will be live-streamed to the CLI and the log will continue streaming as long as the server is running. Press Ctrl-C to stop the server and stop streaming the log file.

Debug Logging

You can get additional information about a server start with the --debug flag. When debug is set, the start command will not exit immediately, but wait for the server to come up and live stream the debugging information and server logs to the console while the server is coming up.

Maximum logging! (trace)

You may still really be having issues getting your server to start up correctly due to a setting not getting picked up, rewrites not working, or maybe a jar not loading. You can "drink from the firehose" so to speak by turning on trace level logging. This works best when starting the server via the console so you can watch the logging as it streams past.

CommandBox stores information about each of the servers you've ever started inside ~/.CommandBox/servers.json so it can remember settings from one run to the next.

List your server

You can see an overview of your servers and what state they're in with the server list command.

server list

site1 (starting)
  https://127.0.0.1:8081
  C:\site1

site1 (running)
  https://127.0.0.1:8082
  C:\site2

site3 (stopped)
  https://127.0.0.1:8083
  C:\site3

If you have many servers, you can provide parameters to help filter the results from server list

# All servers containing the word "foo"
server list foo

# Running servers
server list --running

To list only the servers that have been started in a given directory, use the --local flag.

server list --local

You can take a quick look at the what's been happening with the server log command or use the server status command to see more detailed information including the arguments used previously to start/stop the server.

Multiple Servers

Servers are uniquely identified by their full path, but they also have a short name which defaults to the immediate folder containing their web root. The stop, start, etc commands can be run in the web root for a server, or in any working directory as long as you reference the server's short name.

start site1
start site2
restart site3
stop site2
stop --all

Another handy shortcut is the server cd command that will change the current working directory of the interactive shell to the web root of a named server.

server cd site1
start
server cd site2
install myPackage
restart

Info Server name is the first parameter to all server commands and tab completion works too, making it as easy as possible for you.

Get Server Information

You can get information about a server using the server info command. Add the --JSON flag to get the data back in a JSON format. The property parameter will allow you to retrieve a single value for scripting mashups.

server info
server info --JSON
server info property=serverHomeDirectory
server info property=consoleLogPath

Forgetting Servers

If you want to wipe all configuration, logs, and WEB-INF files for a server, use the server forget command. This will also remove any administrator settings you may have saved including data sources, mail servers, and server mappings.

server forget

You can forget all your servers at once too if you want to start with a clean slate. This command will stop and forget all servers.

server stop --all --forget

Prune Old Servers

You can easily forget all servers which have not been started for a certain period of time with the server prune command. It accepts the number of days that need to have passed since a server was last started in order to prune it.

server prune days=30

# Skip the confirmation check
server prune --force

You can also get back just a JSON representation of servers matching the filter with the --json flag. The JSON will be in the same format as the server list --json command.

server prune 100 --json

FusionReactor is a popular tool for monitoring performance and gathering metrics for ColdFusion and Java J2EE applications. You may wish to use FusionReactor with the servers you start up via CommandBox. We've created a CommandBox module that will add FusionReactor support to your CommandBox servers which you can view here on ForgeBox.

https://www.forgebox.io/view/commandbox-fusionreactor

Installation

The CommandBox FusionReactor module is a separate project that you can optionally install by typing this:

install commandbox-fusionreactor

That's it-- now every server you start with the start command will automatically have the JVM args added to it to load up FusionReactor.

Usage

There's nothing special you have to do in order for FusionReactor to load. A random port will be chosen for FusionReactor to use so you can have more than one server running at a time and each of them will have their own FusionReactor instance running. When you start a server, you should see some output similar to this:

******************************************
* CommandBox FusionReactor Module Loaded *
******************************************

FusionReactor will be available at the URL http://127.0.0.1:2871

To open FusionReactor in your browser, you can run the following command:

fr open

If you right click on the tray icon for this server, you'll see there is a new menu item at the bottom called Open Fusion Reactor that will do the same thing.

Licensing

FusionReactor is a commercial product and requires a license to use. If your company has a license for you to use on your PC, then you can register your CommandBox FusionReactor license with this command:

fr register "myLicenseKey"

If you don't have a license, you can sign up for a trial and purchase a license from the http://www.fusion-reactor.com/ website.

Hide License Key

By default, the license key will always be displayed on the home page after login. You can turn off the display of the key on a per-server basis or at a global level for all servers.

# Server specific
server set fusionreactor.hideLicenseKey=true
# global default
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.hideLicenseKey=true

Custom Port

By default, the module always picks a random port to start FusionReactor on. You can also set your FusionReactor port on a per-server basis, or at a global level for all servers (if using the fancy host updater module which prevents port conflicts by binding each site to its own IP). The default behavior will still be to pick a random port if you don't specify one.

# Server specific port
server set fusionreactor.port=8088
# global default port
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.port=8088

Custom Host

By default, the module will bind FR's port to the same host as your CommandBox web server. You can ask FR to bind to a separate host/IP on a per server basis, or a global basis.

# Server specific host
server set fusionreactor.host=0.0.0.0
# global default hsot
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.host=0.0.0.0

Disable the module

You may want to turn the FusionReactor functionality on or off based on your testing or for specific sites. There is now an enable flag for just that. It can be set per server and for all servers as well.

server set fusionreactor.enable=false
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.enable=false

Per-server License Key

You can set a license key per server if you wish like so:

server set fusionreactor.licenseKey=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX

Managing Versions

The module is regularly updated to use the latest version of FusionReactor. Note however that your license key may not be for the latest FR version. When the internal default version of FR is updated for a major release, the version of the actual FR module will also have a "major" version increment. This is so you can always run upgrade --system and you won't have to worry about suddenly getting a major FR upgrade one day that doesn't work with your license key.

If you want to upgrade your CommandBox FusionReactor module to a new major release, just re-run the installation command.

install commandbox-fusionreactor

Custom Version of FusionReactor

If you have an older FR license you want to use, you can specify the version of FR you'd like like so:

# Server specific version
server set fusionreactor.installID=fusionreactor@7.x
# global default version
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.installID=fusionreactor@7.x

The installID setting can be any valid CommandBox endpoint installation ID, which means you can point to a custom HTTP URL, or ForgeBox slug, etc.

Debugger Libs

As of version 4.0 of this module, the debugger libs will be added automatically for you based on your OS. To disable the debugger libs use the following setting:

# Server specific version
server set fusionreactor.debugEnable=false
# global default version
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.debugEnable=false

Provide External reactor.conf File

There are a handful of JVM args we can use to set things like license key or password, but there are many many settings inside of FusionReactor that have no corresponding method to externalize them. These are stored in a file called conf/reactor.conf inside of the FusionReactor home directory. If you want to script out settings such as

• E-mail servers

• Notification settings

• Profiler settings

• Request history settings

Then you can make a copy of a reactor.conf file that contains the settings you want the point this module at the file to be copied over when starting the server so FR will pick it up and use it. Just need in mind that this setting will override any manual setting changes you make in the FR web admin every time you start the server.

Start up a test server with the FR module installed

install commandbox-fusionreactor
server start

Navigate to the FR admin, login, and set your desired settings

fr open

Copy the populated reactor.conf file somewhere for later use

cp "`server info property=FRHomeDirectory`conf/reactor.conf" ./reactor.conf

Point your server.json to the new file. Remember, non-absolute paths are relative to the directory the server.json lives in.

server set fusionreactor.reactorconfFile=reactor.conf

Now, a fresh new server will have these settings.

server stop 
server forget --force
server start

Note: the reactor.conf file may contain passwords or other sensitive information. It is in a java properties file format, so feel free to edit it and remove items you don't want. Also, take care when committing it to a source repo or making it web accessible so you don't reveal information. There is currently no support for environment variable expansions in this file, but perhaps we'll add it if it's useful.

Additional JVM args

The CommandBox FusionReactor module has passthrough settings for every documented JVM arg. Here are the remaining ones we haven't covered. If you want to know what some of these do, read the official FR docs on them.

Here's the module setting, followed by the JVM arg it creates. Remember, you can use environment variables in your server.json to control these dynamically on a per-server basis!

• fusionreactor.password - fradminpassword

• fusionreactor.cloudGroup - fr.cloud.group

• fusionreactor.requestObfuscateParameters - fr.request.obfuscate.parameters

• fusionreactor.autoApplicationNaming - fr.application.auto_naming

• fusionreactor.defaultApplicationName - fr.application.name

• fusionreactor.EDSEnable - fr.ed.ds.enable (version added: 8.1.0)

• fusionreactor.EDSListen - fr.ed.ds.listen (version added: 8.1.0)

• fusionreactor.EDSPollTimeout - fr.ed.ds.polltimeout (version added: 8.1.0)

• fusionreactor.EDSMaxDataSize - fr.ed.ds.maxdatasize (version added: 8.2.2)

• fusionreactor.EDSTarget - fr.ed.ds.target (version added: 8.1.0)

• fusionreactor.EDSGroups - fr.ed.ds.groups (version added: 8.1.0)

• fusionreactor.ChatEnabled - fr.chat.enabled (version added: 8.7.2)

Deprecated since 8.0.x

• fusionreactor.RESTRegisterURL - frregisterwith

• fusionreactor.RESTShutdownAction - frshutdownaction

• fusionreactor.RESTRegisterHostname - frregisterhostname

• fusionreactor.RESTRegisterGroup - frregistergroup

• fusionreactor.licenseDeactivateOnShutdown - frlicenseservice.deactivateOnShutdown

• fusionreactor.licenseLeaseTimeout - frlicenseservice.leasetime.hint

External Server

By default, FusionReactor is only available on the FR port, and not the HTTP or HTTPS port. If you want to hit FusionReactor's web UI through your main web server on the standard HTTP port, then enable the external server setting. This completely bypasses the custom port and custom host discussed above.

This can provide a convenient method to make FR accessible, but remember to put appropriate lock-down rules on your external web server so FR is not publicly accessible. Also note if you have a web server such as Nginx only proxying traffic to .cfm URLs to CommandBox, you'll need to modify it to also proxy requests to /fusionreactor/ to CommandBox as well or this feature will not work and you'll just get an Nginx/etc 404 instead.

# Server specific version
server set fusionreactor.externalServerEnable=true
# global default version
config set server.defaults.fusionreactor.externalServerEnable=true

CommandBox allows you full control over the servers you start. This includes the port and host, custom JVM args, URL rewriting, web aliases, custom error pages, and custom welcome files.

Ways to provide configuration

Configuration can be set at several different levels:

1. Passed as parameters to the server start command

2. Stored in a server.json file for that server

3. Global defaults in the server.defaults config setting

4. Internal defaults from the ServerService

Settings will be used in that order. Also, any parameters passed to the start command will automatically be saved to your server.json file unless you pass the --noSaveSettings flag.

File path handling

A lot of settings used to start a server involve file paths. Paths starting with a drive letter like C:/, a UNC network path like \\, or a leading slash like / are considered absolute paths and will not be expanded. Try to avoid absolute paths if you want to make your server config portable.

Paths that start with a file/folder name like foo/bar.jar or ../../lib/my.jar are relative and the root folder that they are relative to depends on where there are specified.

• If the path is passed as a parameter to the start command, the path is relative to the current working directory

• If the path is in the server.json file, it is relative to the folder containing the JSON file. (Remember the server.json doesn't have to be in the web root!)

• If the path is in a global server.defaults config setting, it is relative to the web root of the server.

Your CF engine (Lucee, Adobe, etc) or Java app may have application logs of its own and their locations will vary based on what you have running. In any case, they will most likely be located under the server home directory.

CF App server logs

You can find out where your server home is by running:

server info property=serverHomeDirectory

You can also get the full path to your servlet's "out" log with this command:

server info property=consolelogPath

This log file is the equivalent of your catalina.out file on a typical Lucee/Tomcat install or the equivalent of your coldfusion-out.log file on a typical ColdFusion install.

The Servlet's "out" log can be tailed with this command:

server log --follow
server log myServerName --follow

Your console "out" log will auto-rotate every 10MB to keep it from getting too big. Don't use the --debug or --trace flag on a production server or you'll get a lot of logging information! Without those flags, the "out" log doesn't log anything for each request. With debug enabled, you'll get basic information for each request that comes in as well as whether a rewrite rule fired, and with trace, you'll get a ton of information about every request as well as every local path resolution by the path resource manager.

Lucee Server's Log Files

There are many log files for Lucee. For the guide below, I'm assuming you haven't set a custom serverConfigDir or webConfigDir for your servers. If you have, adjust the paths for the server and web context to be whatever it is you've configured. Here are the three locations you'll find log file and is pretty much the same for Lucee 4 and Lucee 5.

1. Lucee's server context log files - The server context is located under the server home which you can find with the command server info property=serverHomeDirectory. Open that directory and then navigate to WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/.

2. Lucee's web context log files - The web context is also located under the server home. Open that directory and then navigate to WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/.

So, to give real examples-- a Lucee server I just looked at on my machine has the three folders of log files I just covered above in these locations:

C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/logs/server.out.txt

C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/application.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/datasource.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/deploy.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/gateway.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/mapping.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/memory.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/orm.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/remoteclient.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/rest.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/scope.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/search.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-server/context/logs/thread.log

C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/application.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/datasource.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/deploy.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/gateway.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/mapping.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/memory.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/orm.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/remoteclient.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/rest.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/scope.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/search.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}cfconfig/lucee-4.5.5.006/WEB-INF/lucee-web/logs/thread.log

Adobe ColdFusion's Log Files

Since Adobe doesn't have the separation of server and web contexts, it only has two log locations which are as follows on all versions.

1. ColdFusion server log files - The remaining log files are located under the server home which you can find with the command server info property=serverHomeDirectory. Open that directory and then navigate to WEB-INF\cfusion\logs/.

So, to give real examples-- a ColdFusion server I just looked at on my machine has the two folders of log files I just covered above in these locations:

C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/logs/server.out.txt

C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/application.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/audit.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/eventgateway.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/exception.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/monitor.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/scheduler.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/server.log
C:/users/brad/.CommandBox/server/{hash}-testSite/adobe-2016.0.03.300466/WEB-INF/cfusion/logs/websocket.log

Access Log

CommandBox servers use a powerful Java-based web server which we've tested to have throughput just as good as Apache or IIS. You can enable "access" logs which output one line for each HTTP request (even for static assets like JS or image files) in the same "common" format that Apache web server uses.

server set web.accessLogEnable=true

View the location of this log or tail the log contents like so:

server info property=accessLogPath
server log --follow --access
server log myServername --follow --access

Your access log will be auto-rotated every day.

Rewrite Log

CommandBox servers use the java-based Tuckey rewrite engine for easy URL rewriting. There's a lot of good debugging information available to help figure out why your rewrites aren't working. You can enable a separate rewrite log to view this information. Keep in mind this can generate a lot of logging output.

server set web.rewrites.logEnable=true

View the location of this log or tail the log contents like so:

server info property=rewritesLogPath
server log --follow --rewrites
server log myServername --follow --rewrites

Your rewrites log will be auto-rotated every 10MB. The amount of information that appears in the rewrites log will be affected by the --debug and --trace flags when you start the server.

Request Dumping

There is a feature you can use to dump all the header details for an HTTP request and response in the form of an Undertow handler called dump-request(). Just include the following server rule in your server.json

{
  "web" : {
    "rules" : [
      "dump-request()"
    ]
  }
}

To fire only for certain requests, you can pair the handler with any predicate you wish:

{
  "web" : {
    "rules" : [
      "regex('(.*).cfm') -> dump-request()"
    ]
  }
}

Then start your server with the --console flag or tail the console with server log --follow and you'll see info like this for each request:

Request Dump:
----------------------------REQUEST---------------------------
               URI=/bar.cfm
 characterEncoding=null
     contentLength=-1
       contentType=null
            header=Accept=text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
            header=Accept-Language=en-US,en;q=0.9,nb;q=0.8,da;q=0.7
            header=Accept-Encoding=gzip, deflate, br
            header=User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.84 Safari/537.36
            header=Host=127.0.0.1:55599
            locale=[en_US, en, nb, da]
            method=GET
          protocol=HTTP/1.1
            scheme=http
              host=127.0.0.1:55599
        serverPort=55599
          isSecure=false
--------------------------RESPONSE--------------------------
     contentLength=3
       contentType=text/html;charset=UTF-8
            header=Connection=keep-alive
            header=Content-Type=text/html;charset=UTF-8
            header=Content-Length=3
            header=Date=Thu, 31 Mar 2022 22:55:19 GMT
            status=200

==============================================================

It is common to protect pages on your site through your CF code that runs on every request. This does not protect static files like images, plus it can still expose extra surface area of your site for attack. CommandBox has a security system to block certain paths on your site at the web server level, so these requests never reach CF.

Authentication Mechanisms

There are currently two authentication mechanisms you can enable in CommandBox. Any combination of them can be used to secure the protected portions of your site. When CommandBox determines that the current page requires authentication, it will check each enabled auth mechanism until it finds one that can validate the user.

Basic Authentication

Basic Authentication is built on a simple username/password list and challenges the user to provide credentials in their browser. Read more here

Client Cert Authentication

Client Cert auth is common for internal government sites and involves the user installing a private certificate on their PC which the server asks the browser to send while negotiation the SSL connection. Client certs are a PKI cert, and often times are stored on a CAC which is a physical card issued to the user. Read more here

More to Come

There are more auth mechanisms we will add in the future including Digest Auth, Header Auth, and SSO. Contact us if you're wanting to sponsor any of these.

Auth Predicate

If you do not provide an auth predicate but you enable at least one auth mechanism, ALL PAGES on the entire site will be secured. This is quite secure, but often times you only want to protect a subfolder such as /CFIDE/administrator or /lucee/admin.

To limit the scope of what pages required authentication, you can specify an auth predicate, which follows the same syntax as Server Rules.

server set web.security.authPredicate="regex( pattern='^/lucee/admin/.*', case-sensitive=false )"

We don't recommend using path() or path-prefix() as they are not case sensitive, which can lead to them being easily worked around if you are on Windows. Even regex() is case-sensitive by default. Only use a case sensitive predicate matcher if your file system and web server are set to be case sensitive! If your server is case sensitive, then the example above can be simplified to this:

server set web.security.authPredicate="path-prefix(/lucee/admin/)"

The most common auth predicates match a subfolder, but you are not limited to this. Anything valid in a server rule predicate can be used here, including HTTP method, headers, remote IP, etc.

CommandBox's web server supports enabling Basic Auth on your sites.

server set web.security.basicAuth.enabled=true
server set web.security.realm="My Realm"
server set web.security.basicAuth.users.brad=pass
server set web.security.basicAuth.users.luis=pass2

That will create the following data in your server.json, which will be picked up the next time you start your server.

{
    "web":{
        "security" : {
            "realm" : "My Realm",
            "authPredicate" : "regex( pattern='^/lucee/admin/.*', case-sensitive=false )"
            "basicAuth":{
                "users":{
                    "brad":"pass",
                    "luis":"pass2"
                },
                "enable":"true"
            }
        }
    }
}

If there is no authPredicate set, basic auth with secure ALL PAGES on the site. Once you set an authPredicate, only the pages matching the predicate will require authentication.

The old setting location for Basic Auth (web.basicAuth) will STILL WORK until the next major version of CommandBox, but should be considered deprecated. If both the settings exist (Ex: web.basicAuth.enable and web.security.basicAuth.enable), the new location will be given precedence.

Server scripts work just like Package Scripts, but they only apply to server-related interceptor points, and they go in your server.json. If you have several servers in a folder with their own server-name.json files, the server scripts can be different per server.

The interception points which will fire a server script are:

• preServerStart

• onServerStart

• onServerInstall

• onServerStop

• preServerForget

• postServerForget

Read more about when these interception points fire here.

Configure server scripts like so in your server.json:

{
    "scripts":{
        "onServerInstall":"cfpm list"
    }
}

Ad-hoc server scripts

Just like package scripts, you can also create ad-hoc scripts for a given server. They are executed with the server run-script command. Define them as additional keys in the scripts block.

{
    "name" : "My Server"
    "scripts":{
        "myScript":"server log --follow"
    }
}

And run them like so:

server run-script myScript

It's important to note that each server you start opens a new Java process on your host operating system. This allows each server to have it's own settings and configuration independent of any other server. Start as many as you need and simply stop them when you're done. Just keep in mind each server gets its own heap space so keep an eye on your available RAM.

Server Runs Independant of CLI

The embedded server instances are also a separate process from the actual CommandBox CLI process, which also runs on Java. This means you can open the interactive shell, start a few servers, then quit the shell, yet the servers will still continue to run. You can use the CLI to issue a stop command in the servers web root, or just right click on the tray icon.

There is currently no way to have servers start automatically when your computer boots, though there's nothing preventing you from setting up a local script to run the start commands for you.

WEB-INF

You may be used to having your server's WEB-INF folder living in your web root. The CommandBox embedded server still has a dedicated WEB-INF folder for each server you start, but it lives under the main CommandBox installation directory in your user folder. Changes you make to the WEB-INF such as adding jars or new tas will be persisted until you issue a server forget command.

CommandBox servers have a method of locking down secure URLs and or implementing any of the Undertow predicate and handlers via a nice text based language. Undertow supports a “predicate language” that allows a string to be parsed into a graph of predicates (conditions) and handlers (actions to take). Ex:

path-suffix-nocase(/box.json) -> set-error(404)

These rules can be used for any of the following:

• Security - Block paths, IPs, or users

• URL rewrites - Rewrite incoming URLs to something different

• Modifying HTTP requests on the fly - Set headers, cookies, or response codes

Much of this functionality overlaps with the existing Tuckey-based rewrites in CommandBox, but this functionality is built directly into Undertow, has a more streamlined syntax, and allows for easier ad-hoc rules to be layered into a server that allows for you to have custom rules layered on top of built in rules. It can be used to replace what Tuckey does, or added on top.

Create your Rules

Unlike custom Tuckey-based rewrites that must be placed in a single XML file, server rules can be provided ad-hoc in a variety of locations. They are combined and passed to the server in the order defined. This allows you to easily "layer" custom rules along with out-of-the-box lockdown profiles.

For maximum configuration options, the following mechanisms are supported for specifying the rules for a given server. Rules are processed in the order listed. i.e., a rule defined in your server.json is processed prior to a rule in your server.default config setting.

1. Ad-hoc rule array in server.json

2. External rules files in server.json in the order defined

3. Ad-hoc rule array in config setting server.defaults

4. External rules files in config setting server.defaults in the order defined

5. CommandBox built-in rules (web.blockCFAdmin, web.blockSensitivePaths)

6. Any module listening to server interceptions can inject their rules wherever they please in the array.

server.json Rules

You can specify ad-hoc rules in the web.rules property as an array of strings in your server.json as well as specify one or more external rule files in the web.rulesFile property as an array or list of file glob patterns.

{
    "web" : {
        "rules" : [
            "path-suffix-nocase(/box.json) -> set-error(404)",
            "path-suffix-nocase(hidden.js) -> set-error(404)",
            "path-prefix-nocase(/admin/) -> ip-access-control(192.168.0.* allow)",
            "path(/sitemap.xml) -> rewrite(/sitemap.cfm)",
        "disallowed-methods(trace)"
        ],
          "rulesFile" : "../secure-rules.json"
        // Or...
          "rulesFile" : ["../security.json","../rewrites.txt","../app-headers.json"]
        // Or...
          "rulesFile" : "../rules/*.json"
    }
}

External rule files with a .json suffix will be expected to be a valid JSON file containing an array of strings. Ex:

[
  "path-suffix-nocase(/box.json) -> set-error(404)",
  "path-suffix-nocase(hidden.js) -> set-error(404)"
]

External rule files with any extension OTHER than .json will be expected to be a raw text file with one rule per line. Emtpy lines are ignored and the rules are processed in the order defined.

path-suffix-nocase(/box.json) -> set-error(404)
path-suffix-nocase(hidden.js) -> set-error(404)

Rules specified directly in the server.json or in an external JSON file must be escaped for the JSON they are a part of. Using a plain text external file can help readability since no additional escaping is required for the rules.

config setting server.defaults Rules

Like all other config server defaults, they follow the same pattern as the server.json file.

config set server.defaults.web.ruleFile=/path/to/rules.json

Commenting Out Rules

You can comment out any rule (whether it's in JSON or a text file) by proceeding it with a pound sign (#).

# Here is a comment that will be ignored

# The following rule also won't be run
# path-suffix-nocase(hidden.js) -> set-error(404)

CommandBox's server rules are based directly on the "Predicate Language" feature of JBoss Undertow. All of the official documentation for Undertow's predicate language applies to CommandBox. CommandBox doesn't limit the power of what Undertow provides at all. In fact, we give you some additional out-of-the box predicates and handlers you can use.

There are three concepts you need to understand and you'll be writing your own rules in no time.

• Handler - A wrapper around the request that takes some sort of action such as returning a status code or rewriting the request.

• Predicate - A conditional that evaluates to true or false. Used to Conditionally apply a handler

• Exchange Attribute - An abstracted way to refer to any piece of information about the request or response. Can include URL, query string, cookies, headers, or CGI variables.

Since the parsing of your rules is handled by Undertow, it is case sensitive in many areas and CommandBox cannot control this. The following must always be lower case:

• Predicate names

• Handler names

• Parameter names

• Keywords like and, or, else

The full undertow docs can be found here: https://undertow.io/undertow-docs/undertow-docs-2.0.0/

Handler

A handler will take action on the request. This can redirect the request, rewrite it, abort it, or modify attributes of the request such as setting an HTTP header or status code. If the predicate is omitted, the handler will always fire for all requests. Ex:

disallowed-methods(trace)

Common handlers:

• set() - Sets an exchange attribute (see below)

• rewrite() - Rewrite the request URL

• redirect() - Redirect to another URL

• header() - Sets an HTTP response header

• set-error() - Set HTTP response code and returns the corresponding error page

• ip-access-control() - Configure IP-based allow/deny rules (wildcards and IP ranges allowed)

• done - Skips remaining rules

• request-limit() - Limits concurrent requests

• restart - Restarts process back at start of predicate rule chain (combine with rewrite, etc)

• load-balanced-proxy() - Creates a round robin reverse proxy to a list of URLs

• allowed-methods() / disallowed-methods() - Enforces whitelist/blacklist of HTTP methods on current request

• Full list here: https://undertow.io/undertow-docs/undertow-docs-2.0.0/#built-in-handlers-2

A handler is called using the “name” from the docs and passing any required parameters. Params can be named or positional (if there is only one). Quoting values is only required if they have a space, comma or brace. The following are all equivalent:

set-error(404)
set-error("404")
set-error(response-code=404)
set-error(response-code="404")

Handler parameters that accept an array use the Java array literal syntax which is a comma-delimited list of values in curly braces.

load-balanced-proxy( { 'http://host.com', 'http://host2.com' } )

More than one handler can be run by wrapping them in curly braces and using semicolons between them

path(/restart) -> { rewrite(/foo/a/b); restart; }

A chain of handlers can be configured for the true AND false evaluation of a single predicate using the “else” keyword.

regex('(.*).css') -> set(attribute='%{o,css}', value='true') else set(attribute='%{o,css}', value='false');

Predicates

A predicate is a condition that must be matched for the handler to kick in. If using path-based predicates on Windows, make sure to use the -nocase version for security rules since your file system is not case sensitive.

Common predicates:

• path()/path-nocase() - match the incoming request path

• path-suffix()/path-suffix-nocase() - match full file/folder names at the end of the path like file.cfm

• path-prefix()/path-prefix-nocase() - match full file/folder names at the start of the path like /lucee/admin

• method() - Match the HTTP method

• regex()/regex-nocase() - Match a regular expression against any exchange attribute

• equals()/equals-nocase() and contains()/contains-nocase() - Do a text compare on any exchange attribute

• path-template() - match a path with placeholders like /foo/{bar} and the placeholders become variables for use in later predicates or handlers in the chain.

• Full list here: https://undertow.io/undertow-docs/undertow-docs-2.0.0/#textual-representation-of-predicates

A predicate is called by placing parentheses after the name and passing in the required arguments as specified in the docs for that predicate. Quoting values is only required if they have a space, comma or brace. The following are all equivalent:

method(GET)
method("GET")
method(value=GET)
method(value="GET")

Complex conditions can be constructed with more than one predicate using the keywords “and” or “or”.

path-prefix(/tests/) OR path-prefix(/workbench)

A predicate can be negated with the keyword “not”

not method(POST)

Exchange Attributes

Exchange attributes are an abstraction Undertow provides to reference any part of the HTTP request or response. There is a textual placeholder that can be used in predicates and handlers that will be expanded in-place.

Common Exchange Attributes:

• %{REMOTE_IP} - Remote IP address

• %{PROTOCOL} - Request protocol

• %{METHOD} - Request method

• %{REMOTE_USER} - Remote user that was authenticated

• %{RESPONSE_TIME} - Time taken to process the request, in ms

• %{c,cookie_name} - Any cookie value

• %{q,query_param_name} - Any query parameter

• %{i,request_header_name} - Any request header

• %{o,response_header_name} - Any response header

• ${anything-here} - Any value from the predicate context (such as regex capture groups or path-template placeholders)

• Full list here: https://undertow.io/undertow-docs/undertow-docs-2.0.0/#exchange-attributes-2

Use an exchange attribute like you would a variable as the parameter to a handler or predicate.

set(attribute='%{o,someHeader}', value=myValue)
not equals('%{REMOTE_IP}', 127.0.0.1) -> set-error(403)

These are all equivalent:

regex(pattern="/(MSIE 6\.0)", value="%{i,user-agent}" ) -> response-code( 404 )
regex(pattern="/(MSIE 6\.0)", value="%{i,USER-AGENT}" ) -> response-code( 404 )
regex(pattern="/(MSIE 6\.0)", value="%{i,UsEr-AgEnT}" ) -> response-code( 404 )

Client Cert Authentication is common for internal government sites and involves the user installing a private certificate on their PC which the server asks the browser to send while negotiation the SSL connection. Client certs are a PKI cert, and often times are stored on a CAC which is a physical card issued to the user.

It is a requirement that the user hit your site via SSL in order for their browser to send their client cert OR for you to opt into accepting upstream client cert HTTP headers from a proxy or web server that is negotiating your SSL connection. It is recommended you configure your server to either disable HTTP or automatically redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS, which can be enabled with the web.SSL.forceSSLRedirect setting.

Accepting Client Certs

Configuring your SSL connection to accept or require client certs is covered in the SSL Client Cert portion of the docs. It's important to note configuring your server to accept SSL client certs and using these certs to authenticate a user two different things. It's possible to accept (or even require) your client (browser) to send a client cert in your web.ssl.clientCert settings but not use the authentication mechanism to protect parts of your site automatically. Any time a browser has sent a client cert, you will be able to access those details from the CGI and request scopes to do your own custom authentication. It is also possible to use Client Cert authentication but not have.

Client Cert Renegotiation

If you have configured your SSL Client Cert settings to accept, but not require client certs, this will allow a user to visit your site and not be challenged to provide a cert until they hit a page that your authPredicate kicks in and requires authentication. Only then will the user's browser prompt them for a cert.

server set web.security.clientCert.SSLRenegotiationEnable=true

SSL Renegotiation, when enabled, will disable HTTP/2 AND TLSv1.3. Both of these are not compatible with SSL Renegotiation.

Trust Upstream Client Cert Headers

Even if CommandBox is not using SSL directly, but is sitting behind a proxy or web server that takes care of negotiating the client cert, you can still use client cert auth to protect pages on your site if you configure CommandBox to trust any SSL_CLIENT_CERT HTTP request header.

server set web.security.clientCert.trustUpstreamHeaders=true

Only enable this setting if you TRUST your upstream proxy and you know it will overwrite any potentially-malicious SSL_CLIENT_CERT header from the client. SSL Certs received through this header will appear in the CGI and request scope and will be trusted the same as a client cert directly negotiated through CommandBox, but there will be NO trust chain verification. The header will be trusted blindly from your upstream server. This setting is off by default.

Enable Client Cert Authentication

You can enable the client cert auth mechanism like so:

server set web.security.clientCert.enable=true

Once enabled, all pages on your site will be secured if you have no authPredicate configured. Otherwise, only pages that match the predicate will be secured.

Validate Incoming Certs

By default, when you enable client cert auth, CommandBox simply checks that some client cert is present. Remember, your SSL settings require you to provide a Trust Store or a list of trusted root CAs and only client certs which are trusted by one of those CAs will be negotiated. This may be enough security for you right there if you are only allowing certs signed/trusted by a specific root cert. The client cert trust store requires you to explicitly provide every single CA you want trusted. It does NOT use your Operating system's trust store, nor does it use Java's trust store, nor does it use Lucee Servers.

If a request is authorized via a client cert, the Subject distinguished name of the client cert will be present in cgi.remote_user just like basic auth works.

Filter Subject Distinguished Name (SDN)

You can filter down a subset of client certs you want to be accepted for client cert auth by specifying a full or partial subject DN. This will not limit the certs which are negotiated and appear in the CGI scope. It will only limit the certs which are allowed to provide authentication for pages secured by the authPredicate. A Subject Distinguished Name (SDN) contains one or more parts known as Relative Distinguished Names, or RDNs. They follow an LDAP name RFC and look like this:

CN=Brad Wood, O=Ortus, OU=Dev

You may provide a single Subject DN ...

server set web.security.clientCert.subjectDNs="O=Walmart"

or an array of Subject DNs to filter on...

server set web.security.clientCert.subjectDNs=["CN=Brad","CN=Bob, O=Walmart"]

The RDNs can be in any order and you can supply a PARTIAL Subject DN. CommandBox will match all RDNs regardless of order or case sensitivity. You are not required to provide the full Subject DN, but all RDNs you provide MUST be present in the incoming cert or it will be rejected.

Filter Issuer Distinguished Name (IDN)

You can also filter down a subset of client certs you want to be accepted for client cert auth by specifying a full or partial Issuer DN. This will not limit the certs which are negotiated and appear in the CGI scope. It will only limit the certs which are allowed to provide authentication for pages secured by the authPredicate. An Issuer Distinguished Name (IDN) look and work the same as Subject DNs.

You may provide a single Issuer DN ...

server set web.security.clientCert.issuerDNs="CN=GeoTrust TLS RSA CA G1, O=DigiCert Inc, OU=www.digicert.com"

or an array of Issuer DNs to filter on...

server set web.security.clientCert.issuerDNs=["CN=My CA","O=Verisign"]

The RDNs can be in any order and you can supply a PARTIAL Issuer DN. CommandBox will match all RDNs regardless of order or case sensitivity. You are not required to provide the full Issuer DN, but all RDSs you provide MUST be present in the incoming cert or it will be rejected.

If you require more specific parsing of the cert pieces, then you’ll need to disable the built in security in CommandBox and write your own code that runs on every request and parses the CGI variables manually to decide if you accept the cert.

server.json Configuration

Here is a look at what your full config could look like in your server.json. Note this doesn't show the web.ssl.clientCert settings which are covered here.

{
  "web" : {
    "security" : {
      "realm" : "My Realm",
      "authPredicate" : "path-prefix( /admin )"
      "clientCert" : {
        "enable" : true,
        "SSLRenegotiationEnable":true,
        "subjectDNs" : "O=Ortus, OU=Marketing",
        "issuerDNs" : [
          "O=Verisign",
          "CN=Bob, O=Walmart",
          "CN=GeoTrust TLS RSA CA G1, O=DigiCert Inc, OU=www.digicert.com"
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

The Undertow-based web server built into CommandBox will only serve up static files if they are in a list of valid extensions. This is to prevent prying eyes from hitting files they shouldn't be able to access on your server.

The current list of valid extensions is:

3gp,3gpp,7z,ai,aif,aiff,asf,asx,atom,au,avi,bin,bmp,btm,cco,crt,css,csv,deb,der,dmg,
doc,docx,eot,eps,flv,font,gif,hqx,htc,htm,html,ico,img,ini,iso,jad,jng,jnlp,jpeg,jpg,
js,json,kar,kml,kmz,m3u8,m4a,m4v,map,mid,midi,mml,mng,mov,mp3,mp4,mpeg,mpeg4,mpg,msi,
msm,msp,ogg,otf,pdb,pdf,pem,pl,pm,png,ppt,pptx,prc,ps,psd,ra,rar,rpm,rss,rtf,run,sea,
shtml,sit,svg,svgz,swf,tar,tcl,tif,tiff,tk,ts,ttf,txt,wav,wbmp,webm,webp,wmf,wml,wmlc,
wmv,woff,woff2,xhtml,xls,xlsx,xml,xpi,xspf,zip,aifc,aac,apk,bak,bk,bz2,cdr,cmx,dat,
dtd,eml,fla,gz,gzip,ipa,ia,indd,hey,lz,maf,markdown,md,mkv,mp1,mp2,mpe,odt,ott,odg,
odf,ots,pps,pot,pmd,pub,raw,sdd,tsv,xcf,yml,yaml 

If you have a common static file you need to serve, you can add your own custom extensions to the list like so:

server set web.allowedExt=jar,exe,dll

And to test/debug your rules, start your server with the trace flag and tail the console output. Every hit in your browser will output several lines of debugging for each rule that is processed.

With the custom rule above, you'd see something like this:

The start command will scan your system and find a random port that is not currently in use to start the server on. This ensures that multiple embedded servers can run at the same time on the same host without collisions. Ensure any redirects in your applications take the port into account.

Any Port in the Storm

You may want to set a specific port to use-- even port 80 if nothing else is using it. Pass the HTTP port parameter to the start command like so:

It is also possible to save the default port in your server.json. Add a web.http.port property, or issue the following command:

Now every time you start your server, the same port will be used.

If the server won't start or is unreachable, make sure it's port is free with your operating system's netstat command. On Unix-based OS's:

HTTPS

You can start your server to listen for SSL connections too.

Setting SSL Enabled protocols

You can customize what SSL protocols your HTTPS listener will respond to with the following XNIO option. Supply a comma-delimited list of valid protocols.

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a newer standard of HTTP supported by all modern browsers. HTTP/2 is enabled by default any time you are using an HTTP/HTTPS listener, however all major browsers will only allow the server to negotiate HTTP/2 over an HTTPS connection. HTTP/2 runs over the same port and only changes the exchange between the server and browser. You can disable HTTP/2 support like so:

If you want to confirm whether your browser is using HTTP/2, you can open your debugging tools and look at the network requests. You may need to add the "protocol" column in the UI. HTTP/2 will usually show up as something like "h2" in the protocol column.

AJP

You can start your server to listen for AJP connections too.

AJP Secret

A Gracious Host

Your application may rely on a specific host name other than the default of 127.0.0.1. You can set the host to anything you like, but you must add a host file entry that resolves your host name to an IP address assigned to your network adapter (usually 127.0.0.1)

If you have multiple IP addresses assigned to your PC, you can bind the server to a specific IP using the host parameter.

A server configuration can only have one host entry. If you require your server to be available on multiple IP addresses of the machine it runs on, you can set the host to 0.0.0.0. This will effectively bind the server to all network interfaces (including local).

Or save in server.json

Most modern browsers allow you to make up any subdomain you want before localhost such as mySite.localhost and will simply resolve them to localhost (127.0.0.1) even without a hosts file entry. CommandBox now supports using these domains and will bind your server's ports to localhost even without using the commandbox-hostupdater module.

Customize URL that opens for server

By default, CommandBox will open your browser with the host and port of the server. You can customize the exact URL that opens. This setting will be appended to the current host and port.

Or you can completely override the URL if your setting starts with http://.

If CommandBox is running a server behind a trusted proxy which is known to set the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header, then you can enable this setting for the remote IP in your CF engine's cgi scope to represent the upstream IP.

This is disabled by default. Otherwise a malicious client could send a fake X-Forwarded-For HTTP header to make it look like their traffic was coming from a trusted IP such as 127.0.0.1 to bypass any IP-based restrictions. Only enable this if you trust the proxy CommandBox is sitting behind. This should never be enabled if CommandBox is directly accessible on the internet.

Enable for all servers like so:

Baked-in Rules

CommandBox has a few baked in rules that you can apply ad-hoc or as part of a server profile.

• web.blockCFAdmin - Returns 404 error page for any Adobe CF or Lucee Server admin administrator paths

• web.blockSensitivePaths - Returns 404 error page for common config files such as box.json or .env

• web.blockFlashRemoting - Blocks all paths related to Flash and Flex remoting calls

Block CF Admin

This setting has three possible settings:

• true - Block ALL access to ColdFusion and Lucee admins

• false - Do not block anything

• external - Only block access not coming from localhost.

The exact rule activated when you set this property to true is:

The exact rule activated when you set this property to external is:

Block Sensitive Paths

This setting only allows true/false. This is a bit of a catch-all rule for any sort of paths that a user should never be able to make on production that could reveal information or access secret parts of your CF installation. When set to true, the following rules are activated:

When the profile is set to production, the following rule is also added which blocks the ColdFusion RDS access from CF Builder and access to TestBox runners:

If you need to legitimately access any of these paths, you'll need to turn off this setting and custom-add the rules that you want to keep. This setting is a convenience that adds several rules at once.

Block Flash Remoting

This setting only allows true/false. When set to true, the following rules are activated:

If you need to legitimately access any of these paths, you'll need to turn off this setting and custom-add the rules that you want to keep. This setting is a convenience that adds several rules at once.

Override just part of a baked-in rule

What if you want to go one step deeper? For instance, the blockSensitivePaths setting blocks a whole bunch of stuff all in one shot. An example might be wanting to open up JUST the RDS IDE integration for your developers, which funnels through the /CFIDE/main/ide.cfm path which you can see is blocked above.

The solution to this is quite simple and is all based on the ORDER in which your rules are processed. Built-in CommandBox rules are the last to process. This means that if you hijack the predicates with a custom rule FIRST, you can override the behavior of the built in rules. So, if we want to allow access to the /CFIDE/main/ide.cfm path, we just need to add a custom rule that matches that path and then aborts the predicate chain so no further rules fire.

Which gives you the following server.json

The done handler is what bypasses all subsequent rules for the request.

CommandBox bundles some custom predicates and handlers to make your life easier.

The predicate cf-admin() will returns true if the incoming URL is to the Lucee or ColdFusion admin:

The handler block-external() blocks any request not from localhost with a 404 response code. You can pair this with any predicate you choose.

The handler block-cf-admin() blocks any request to the Lucee or ColdFusion admin with a 404 response code.

Build Your Own

You can build your own predicates and handlers by compiling java classes that implement the io.undertow.predicate.PredicateBuilder or io.undertow.server.handlers.builder.HandlerBuilder interfaces. If the proper service metadata is present in your jar's META-INF folder, undertow will automatically find and register your builders via Java's service loader.

This isn't super difficult but involves a few moving parts. If you're interested in writing your own handlers and predicates to use in your server rules, reach out on the mailing list and we'll walk you through it.

You can see the custom handlers and predicates documented above in our Runwar source code here:

Custom handlers:

Custom Predicates:

There are endless combinations of predicates and handlers you can apply to your apps. Here's an assortment of examples to get you going. Many of these are contrived, but are just mean to show the range of syntax and functionality.

Rewrite a URL:

Stop processing rules for a given request:

For all GET requests, set a response header called type with a value of get

If the incoming path ends with .css it will rewrite the request to .xcss and set a response header called rewritten to true.

Redirect all jpg requests to the same file name but with the png extension. The ${1} exchange attribute is used to reference the first regex group.

Set a request header for all requests that you can access in your CFML app just like a normal HTTP header.

Set a Cache-Control response header only for default index pages(ie: index.html or index.cfm) in any folder.

Set a response header for a specific file.

Match certain SES-style URLs and store the place holders (referenced as exchange attributes) into HTTP request headers.

In this example, hitting the server with /restart skips the first rule, the second rule rewrites the request and then restarts back at the first rule which fires the second time through.

Block access to a URL unless coming from a specific IP.

For more control over IP address matches, use the ip-access-control() handler.

Leading slash is NOT required. Both of these rules are the same:

It is not required to include .*_ at the end of a regex path unless you’ve set full-match=true _

Perform a regex a case insensitive search like so:

When attribute values are not quoted, all leading and trailing whitespace will be trimmed. The following are all the same:

But this example is different. The leading and trailing spaces will be preserved in the path string.

Basic MVC rewrite:

Add a CORs header to every request

Rewrite requests to a sub folder based on the domain

Custom SES URL rewrite that turns 6 digit product code into a query string. (If this rule goes in your server.json, you'll need \\ in front of the dollar sign to escape it twice. Once for the system setting expansion and once for the JSON file.)

Reject requests using an unknown host header.

Create reverse proxy

Accepting a client cert as part of the SSL negotiation is a totally separate idea as using the existence of a client cert to authorize a given request. This is why the settings are in two different place in the server.json. You can have CommandBox ask (or require!) the browser to hand over a client cert, but all that does is set a bunch of CGI variables and servlet request attributes to document what the incoming cert is. The same client cert details can also be passed from an upstream proxy which negotiated the SSL connection and the details can be sent via HTTP headers to CommandBox to use for request authorization. Therefore, CommandBox can enable client certs at the SSL level and NOT enable request authorization, or it can disable its own SSL client cert negotiation but still perform request-level authorization based purely on upstream headers. The two features are not mutually dependent. To read how to have CommandBox automatically protect portions of your site based on a client cert, read here.

Client Cert Negotiation

To enable client certs to be negotiated by CommandBox SSL must be enabled, and then web.ssl.clientCert.mode can be set to one of the following options:

• NOT_REQUESTED - (default) SSL client authentication is not requested. (same as “ignore” in IIS)

• REQUESTED - SSL client authentication is requested but not required. (same as “request” in IIS)

• REQUIRED - SSL client authentication is required. (same as “require” in IIS)

server set web.ssl.clientCert.mode=required

Trust Store

CommandBox will NOT use your OS trust store nor your Java trust store, nor Lucee Server's trust store by default to establish a trust chain for incoming client certs. You must specify the trusted root CA certs that you want trusted. ONLY client certs trusted by one of these CAs will be accepted. Any intermediate certs must also be included. You can specify a comma-delimited list of absolute or relative paths OR an array of strings in the web.ssl.clientCert.CACertFiles setting that point to any number of public keys in a DER format (typically .crt or .cer extension)

server set web.ssl.clientCert.CACertFiles=digitcert.crt,verisign.crt

or

server set web.ssl.clientCert.CACertFiles=["digitcert.crt","verisign.crt"]

If you have a large number of trusted CA’s, you can specify a JKS trust store (same format as Java’s cacerts file) along with the password for the store in the web.ssl.clientCert.CATrustStoreFile and web.ssl.clientCert.CATrustStorePass file. All CAs in that trust store will be used to validate incoming client certs.

server set web.ssl.clientCert.CATrustStoreFile=cacerts
server set web.ssl.clientCert.CATrustStorePass=changeit

server.json Configuration

Here's an example of what your config could look like:

{
  "web" : {
    "ssl" : {
      "enable" : true,
      "clientCert" : {
	"mode" : "Requested",
	"CACertFiles" : "rootCA.cer,anotherRootCA.cer",
	// OR...
	"CACertFiles" : [
    	  "rootCA.cer",
          "anotherRootCA.cer"
	],
	"CATrustStoreFile' : "cacerts",
	"CATrustStorePass' : "changeit"
      }
    }
  }
}

If both a trust store AND individual trusted CA's are provided, CommandBox will use all of them.

Accessing the Client Cert

If the user's browser sends a client cert which is trusted by one of your trusted CAs, then the details of the cert will be available for Client Cert Authentication as documented here. There are also a number of CGI and request variables automatically made available to you any time a client cert was presented. These variables will be available on every page, not just the first page where they select their cert.

CGI Scope

When a valid client cert is present, the following CGI variables will be available to your CF code. If client certs are “requested”, these CGI variables will be wiped from any upstream sources so you can always trust them to be set from CommandBox, even if they are empty. There are several duplicate values since we are mimicking IIS, Apache, and Nginx client cert implementations for maximum compatibility.

• CGI.SSL_CLIENT_CERT - PEM-encoded cert (base 64 string)

• CGI.X_ARR_CLIENTCERT - PEM-encoded cert (base 64 string)

• CGI.SSL_CLIENT_S_DN - The Subject distinguished name of the client cert (CN=foo, O=bar, OU=baz)

• CGI.CERT_SUBJECT - The Subject distinguished name of the client cert (CN=foo, O=bar, OU=baz)

• CGI.CERT_KEYSIZE - The key size of the negotiated SSL connection

• CGI.CERT_SERIALNUMBER - The serial number of the cert in the format 91-7e-5f-a5-b2-20-a1-8b-4c-d0-40-3b-1c-a1-a8-58

• CGI.SSL_CLIENT_M_SERIAL - The serial number of the cert in the format 91-7e-5f-a5-b2-20-a1-8b-4c-d0-40-3b-1c-a1-a8-58

• CGI.SSL_CLIENT_I_DN - The Issuer distinguished name of the client cert (CN=foo, O=bar, OU=baz)

• CGI.CERT_ISSUER - The Issuer distinguished name of the client cert (CN=foo, O=bar, OU=baz)

• CGI.SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY - Matches Apache HTTP. Values will be "SUCCESS" or "NONE"

• CGI.SSL_SESSION_ID - Unique ID of the SSL connection

Note, some of these vars may not appear when you cfdump out the CGI scope, but will still be available when you specify cgi.var_name

Due to some differences between Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee Server, the above variables are loaded as HTTP Request Headers in Lucee and Servlet Request Attributes in Adobe ColdFusion. You can access them in either engine though through the CGI scope, but they may be case sensitive (always upper case)

Request Scope

The following servlet request attribute will also be set, which are accessible in a case sensitive manner from both Adobe and Lucee Server request scopes:

• javax.servlet.request.cipher_suite - The cipher suite of the SSL connection such as TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256

• javax.servlet.request.key_size - The key size of the negotiated SSL connection

• javax.servlet.request.ssl_session_id - Unique ID of the SSL connection

• javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate - An array of java.security.cert.X509Certificate instances representing the certificate chain. These cert objects contain the same data as the PEM-encoded headers.

• javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate.issuerDNMap - A struct containing all the parts of the Issuer distinguished name. So for (CN=foo, O=bar) there would be a key for CN and O in the struct with respective values of foo, and bar. USE THIS instead of regex on the full Issuer DN because this map is generated by following the exact RFC for LDAP names.

• javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate.subjectDNMap - A struct containing all the parts of the Subject distinguished name. So for (CN=foo, O=bar) there would be a key for CN and O in the struct with respective values of foo, and bar. USE THIS instead of regex on the full Subject DN because this map is generated by following the exact RFC for LDAP names.

Access these request vars like so in CFML

myCertArray = request['javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate'];
SubjectRDNs = request['javax.servlet.request.X509Certificate.subjectDNMap'];

Note using quoted string inside of bracket notation is required not only due to the periods in the variable name, but also to preserve the case-sensitivity of them.

Upstream SSL headers

All of the CGI and request vars above can also be present even if CommandBox’s built in client cert negotiation is not enabled if you have PEM-encode headers being sent from your upstream web server. However, you must explicitly tell CommandBox to trust these headers. Only do this if you trust the upstream proxy to always set trusted values into these headers. Enable this by setting the web.security.clientCert.trustUpstreamHeaders key by setting it to true. Them CommandBox will look for the SSL_CLIENT_CERT, SSL_CIPHER, and SSL_SESSION_ID HTTP request headers and associate those certs with the request just as though CommandBox had negotiated them itself.

{
  "web" : {
    "security" : {
      "clientCert" : {
        "trustUpstreamHeaders" : true
      }
    }
  }
}

When using a CommandBox web server in production, you may wish to force your users to visit your site over HTTPS for security (and for HTTP/2 to work). However, it is desirable to still have your web server listening on HTTP so a user just typing your address in his browser can still connect to HTTP and then redirect.

Automatic HTTPS Redirection

CommandBox can be configured to redirect all HTTP traffic over to HTTPS with the following rule. The redirect will use a 301 status code and will include the URL and query string. The redirect will only fire for GET HTTP requests since redirecting a form POST would lose the form fields (request body).

server set web.SSL.forceSSLRedirect=true

Or in the server.json as:

{
  "web": {
    "ssl" : {
      "enable" : true,
      "port" : 443,
      "forceSSLRedirect" : true
     }
  }
}

If you want to customize how this redirect happens, you can skip this setting and manually add the following Server Rule, which is basically what the setting above does automatically:

not secure() and method(GET) -> redirect('https://%{LOCAL_SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URL}%{QUERY_STRING}' )

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)

If you want to go one step further, you can add a Strict-Transport-Security header to your site. This instructs the browser to automatically use HTTPS every time the user visits your site again. With an HSTS header, once your browser has cached the fact that you want HTTPS to always be used, even if the user just types your domain and hits enter, the browser will change it over to HTTPS before sending the request. This prevents having an initial HTTP request before the redirect kicks in.

HSTS headers can have a "max age" set, which tells the browser how long to "remember" to use HTTPS. This defaults to 1 year if you do not override the value. The max age is set in second. So 31,536,000 is one year. You can also set whether you want the HSTS header to apply to all sub domains of your site. The default is false for this setting.

Here is how you enable HSTS. Only the first web.SSL.HSTS.enable setting is required. The rest are optional.

server set web.SSL.HSTS.enable=true
server set web.SSL.HSTS.maxAge=31536000
server set web.SSL.HSTS.includeSubDomains=true

Or in the server.json as:

{
  "web": {
    "ssl" : {
      "enable" : true,
      "port" : 443,
      "HSTS" : {
        "enable" : true,
        "maxAge" : 31536000,
        "includeSubDomains" : true
      }
     }
  }
}

The HSTS header is added via a Server Rule. Here is what the rule looks like in case you want to manually add the rule to customize it.

set(attribute='%{o,Strict-Transport-Security}', value='max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains')

CommandBox will automatically set the content type in the HTTP response for common static file types. If you come across a file extention that doesn't have the correct type, you can set it like so in your server.json:

server set web.mimeTypes.log=text/plain

Which creates the following

{                            
    "web":{                             
        "mimeTypes":{                  
            "log":"text/plain"      
        }
    }
} 

In the above example, hitting a file such as foo.log would come back with a text/plain content type header.

This setting will override any <mime-mapping> tag in your web.xml file.

CommandBox allows you to create web aliases for the web server that are similar to virtual directories. The alias path is relative to the folder the server.json lives in, but can point to any folder on the hard drive. Aliases can be used for static or CFM files.

To configure aliases for your server, create an object under web called aliases. The keys are the web-accessible virtual paths and the corresponding values are the relative or absolute path to the folder the alias points to.

Here's what your server.json might look like.

{
  "web" : {
    "aliases" : {
      "/foo" : "bar",
      "/js" : "C:\static\shared\javascript"
    }
  }
}

Here's how to create aliases from the server set command:

server set web.aliases./foo = bar
server set web.aliases./js = C:\static\shared\javascript

info On Adobe ColdFusion servers, .cfm files will be run automatically from inside an aliases directory. On Railo and Lucee servers, you'll need to create a CF mapping that maps the alias name and path for .cfm files to work.

Once you start using the embedded server for your development projects, you may wish to enable URL rewriting. Rewrites are used by most popular frameworks to do things like add the index.cfm back into SES URLs.

You may be used to configuring URL rewrites in Apache or IIS, but rewrites are also possible in CommandBox's embedded server via a Tuckey servlet filter which uses an xml configuration.

Commandbox also exposes a way to do url rewrites with the Undertow predicate language. If you missed the Server Rules section, go there to learn how to do url rewrites, security, and http header modification in a nice text based language (non-xml).

Default Rules

We've already added the required jars and created a default rewrite XML file that will work out-of-the-box with the ColdBox MVC Platform. To enable rewrites, start your server with the --rewritesEnable flag.

http://tuckey.org/urlrewrite/manual/4.0/index.html

start --rewritesEnable

Now URLs like

http://localhost/index.cfm/main

can now simply be

http://localhost/main

In server.json

server set web.rewrites.enable=true
server show web.rewrites.enable

info The default rewrite file can be found in ~\.CommandBox\cfml\system\config\urlrewrite.xml

Custom Rules

If you want to customize your rewrite rules, just create your own XML file and specify it when starting the server with the rewritesConfig parameter. Here we have a simple rewrite rule that redirects /foo to /index.cfm

customRewrites.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 4.0//EN" "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite4.0.dtd">
<urlrewrite>
    <!-- this will redirect the user from /foo to /index.cfm -->
    <rule>
        <from>^/foo$</from>
        <to type="redirect">/index.cfm</to>
    </rule>
    <!-- internally redirect the requested URL from /gallery to /index.cfm?page=gallery with query string appended -->
    <rule>
        <from>^/gallery</from>
        <to type="passthrough" qsappend="true">/index.cfm?page=gallery</to>
    </rule>

</urlrewrite>

Then, fire up your server with its custom rewrite rules:

start --rewritesEnable rewritesConfig=customRewrites.xml

In server.json

server set web.rewrites.enable=true
server set web.rewrites.config=customRewrites.xml


server show web.rewrites.enable
server show web.rewrites.config

You can place your custom rewrite rule wherever you like, and refer to it by using either a relative path or an absolute path. CommandBox will start looking relative to where the server.json file resides.

server set web.rewrites.enable=true
server set web.rewrites.config=/my/custom/path/customRewrites.xml

or

server set web.rewrites.enable=true
server set web.rewrites.config=~\.CommandBox\cfml\system\config\customRewrites.xml

Apache mod_rewrite-style rules

If you're coming from Apache, Tuckey supports a large subset of the mod_rewrite style rules like what you would put in .htaccess. You can simply put your rules in a file named .htaccess and point the web.rewrites.config property to that file.

Note: The name of the file matters with mod_rewrite-style rules. It must be called .htaccess. With xml rewrites, the filename is not important, only the content.

Here are some simple rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine on

#The ColdBox index.cfm/{path_info} rules.
RewriteRule ^$ index.cfm [QSA,NS]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.cfm/%{REQUEST_URI} [QSA,L,NS]

RewriteRule ^/foo/                         /

# Defend your computer from some worm attacks
RewriteRule .*(?:global.asa|default\.ida|root\.exe|\.\.).* . [F,I,O]

# Redirect Robots to a cfm version of your robots.txt
RewriteRule ^/robots\.txt                   /robots.cfm

# Change your default cfm file to index.cfm
RewriteRule ^/default.cfm                   /index.cfm [I,RP,L]
RewriteRule ^/default.cfm((\?.+)|())$       /index.cfm$1  [I,RP,L]

RewriteRule ^/News.html((\?.+)|())$         /News/index.cfm$1 [I,RP,L]

# redirect mozilla to another area
RewriteCond  %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^Mozilla.*
RewriteRule  ^/no-moz-here$                 /homepage.max.html  [L]

Please see the docs here on what's supported:

http://cdn.rawgit.com/paultuckey/urlrewritefilter/master/src/doc/manual/4.0/index.html#mod_rewrite_conf

info For more information on custom rewrite rules, consult the Tuckey docs.

SES URLs

Your servers come ready to accept SES-style URLs where any text after the file name will show up in the cgi.path_info. If rewrites are enabled, the index.cfm can be omitted.

site.com/index.cfm/home/login

SES URLs will also work in a sub directory, which used to only work on a "standard" Adobe CF Tomcat install. Please note, in order to hide the index.cfm in a subfolder, you'll need a custom rewrite rule.

site.com/myFolder/index.cfm/home/login

Logging

The Tuckey Rewrite engine has debug and trace level logging that can help you troubleshoot why your rewrite rules aren't (or are) firing. To view these logs, simply start your server with the --debug or --trace flags. Trace shows more details than debug. These options work best when starting in --console mode so you can watch the server logs as you hit the site. Alternatively, you can follow the server's logs with the server log --follow command.

start --debug
server log --follow

Additional Tuckey Settings

The Tuckey Rewrite library that CommandBox uses under the hood. It has some extra settings that CommandBox allows you to use.

Watch rewrite file for changes

To monitor your custom rewrite file for changes without needing to restart the server, use this setting.

server set web.rewrites.configReloadSeconds=30

Internal Tuckey status page

To enable the inbuilt Tuckey status page, use the following setting. Note, debug mode needs to be turned on for the Tuckey status page to work. Also, you'll need to customize your rewrite file if you use a path other than /tuckey-status.

server set web.rewrites.statusPath=/tuckey-status

Turning on SSL in your web server will will enable SSL without an approved SSL certificate. If you need an official certificate so you don't have to confirm your SSL connection you can add these entries

server set web.SSL.certFile=/path/to/dev_mydomain_ext.crt
server set web.SSL.keyFile=/path/to/dev_mydomain_ext.key
server set web.SSL.keyPass=myPass

The cert file and private key can be a PEM encoded file, or a DER-format binary file.

You can also use a PFX file (PKCS #8) by specifying it in the web.ssl.certFile setting and then put the password for the PFX file in the web.ssl.keyPass setting. You won't use the web.ssl.keyFile setting for a PFX since the private key is contained in the main file.

Generating a Server Cert

Although free certificates are available (e.g LetsEncrypt) this is not very convenient, because these certs are valid only for three months. Automatic renewal it is difficult if your dev site is not accessible from the web. For a few dollars a year (< 10) you can apply for a domain validated certificate from companies like Comodo, RapidSSL, Trustwave, Digicert, Geotrust and others or a reseller for these certs. For a domain validated certificate you need a valid domain which is under your control which means (depending on provider):

• mail is sent to domain owner

• or mail is sent to well-known administrative contact in the domain, e.g. (admin@, postmaster@, etc.)

• or you can publish a DNS TXT record

So, now you have a valid domain, you have to generate a SSL key and a SSL Certificate Signing Request. With the CSR you can apply for the certificate. Generating a key and CSR with openSSL

openssl req -utf8 -nodes -sha256 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout dev_mydomain_com.key -out dev_mydomain_com.csr

This will generate output and some questions, and will finally result in a key file named dev_mydomain_com.key and a certificate signing request (csr) named dev_mydomain_com.csr

You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:NL
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:YourState
Locality Name (eg, city) []:YourCity
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:YourCompany
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:IT
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:dev.mydomain.com
Email Address []:

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

You have to enter Country Name, State and City. Organization Name is preferably the same as the domain owner. Organizational Unit Name will not be checked, so enter something simple such as ICT Common Name is the host name for your site, such as dev.mydomain.com You can skip Email Address and optional company name. For development you don't need a challenge password, which means your key file is NOT protected. But don't give this key to others or protect it with a challenge password. If you protect your key you have to server set web.SSL.keyPass=MyChallengePassword Now you have a CSR, which you can submit at your SSL provider. They will send you a certificate file (*.csr), and probably one or more intermediate certificates. Create a new my.csr file and copy everything from your certificate file into it, and append the intermediate certificate(s). Now you have a valid my.csr certificate file and a key file. Place both files in a location accessible for your CommandBox and enter the corresponding paths to web.SSL.certFile and web.SSL.keyFile

You can customize the error page that CommandBox servers return. You can have a setting for each status code including a default error page to be used if no other setting applies.

Create an errorPages object inside the web object in your server.json where each key is the status code integer or the word default and the value is a relative (to the web root) path to be loaded for that status code.

This is what you server.json might look like:

{
  "web" : {
    "errorPages" : {
      "404" : "/path/to/404.html",
      "500" : "/path/to/500.html",
      "default" : "/path/to/default.html"
    }
  }
}

You can set error pages via the server set command like this:

server set web.errorPages.404=/missing.htm

Accessing error variables

If your error page points to a CFM file, you can get access to the original path being accessed for 404s and the error that was thrown for 500s. To see all the request headers that are available, use the following snippet of code:

req = getPageContext().getRequest();
names = req.getAttributeNames();
while( names.hasMoreElements() ) {
    name = names.nextElement();
    writeOutput( name & ' = ' & req.getAttribute( name ) & '<br>' );
}

An example of getting the original missing path in a 404 in Lucee would look like this:

var originalPath = getPageContext().getRequest().getAttribute( "javax.servlet.error.request_uri" );

In Adobe ColdFusion, you can access ServletRequest Attributes directly via the CGI scope:

var originalPath = cgi[ 'javax.servlet.error.request_uri' ];

The web server in CommandBox is capable of enabling GZIp compression to reduce the size of HTTP responses. To enable GZip compress on your CommandBox server, add a web.gzipEnable setting in your server.json file.

server set web.gzipEnable=true

By default GZip compression will be applied to any file over 1500 KB in size. This is because 1500 KB or smaller can fit inside a single network packet, so there's no real benifit in zipping small files and it just causes CPU overhead.

If you wish to customize the file size or any other aspect of when GZip compression is applied, you can specify a custom Undertow Predicate that, when true, will trigger GZip for the request.

server set web.gzipPredicate="request-larger-than(500)"

Since ANY valid Undertow predicate language can be used here you can combined predicates to control exactly when GZip compression is applied. This example would apply GZip compression to any CSS files over 500 KB that were not in the /admin folder.

server set web.gzipPredicate="not path-prefix( admin ) and regex( '(.*).css' ) and request-larger-than(500)"

Here are some settings for performance tuning your servers

Max Requests

This setting limits how many requests will be passed through the Undertow listener to your app server. It defaults to 30. Please note that your web server connector and Adobe ColdFusion may also have their own max request setting.

server set web.maxRequests=100

Or as a global setting for all servers:

config set server.defaults.web.maxRequests=100

If you have custom jar files that you want to be available to a server, we recommend you use the this.javaSettings functionality in your Application.cfc to load those jars. If that isn't an option for you, or you want to include libs for a JDBC drivers then we offer a feature for you to specify a list of directories for which CommandBox will load jars from. This prevents you from worrying about getting your jars inside the WEB-INF/lib which starts fresh anytime you forget a server.

To load in your jar files, the first method is to use the libDirs parameter to the server start command.

server start libDirs=path/to/libs,another/path/to/libs

And the way to specify this in a portable manner in your `server.json` is like so:

server set app.libDirs=path/to/libs,another/path/to/libs
server start

Remember, paths to the start command are relative to your current working directory and paths in your server.json file are relative to the folder that the server.json file lives in. Absolute paths work the same everywhere.

Global Custom Libs

Have a bunch of servers and they ALL need the same jars, you can add your `libDirs` to the global server defaults config settings. Your global lib directories won't be overwritten by server-level config dirs, but instead appended to. Relative paths in your config settings are relative to the respective web root of the server. CommandBox will also ignore missing lib dirs to give you some flexibility in this.

config set servers.defaults.app.libDirs=/path/to/global/libs

By Default, your servers start using the same version of Java that the CommandBox CLI is using. For people needing to run Adobe ColdFusion 9, or who just want to do some testing on different JREs, you can point each of your servers at a custom JRE and CommandBox will use it when starting the server.

if you already have a JRE downloaded somewhere on your hard drive, you can manually point the server at it, or you can simply tell CommandBox which version of java you'd like, at it will automatically download that version of OpenJDK for your server to use (if it's not already downloaded)

Manual Java Config

Point CommandBox to an existing java install like so:

server set jvm.javaHome="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_25"

To set the default version of Java for all the servers you start on your machine, use the global config setting defaults.

config set server.defaults.jvm.javaHome="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_25"

Automatic Java Download

To let CommandBox take over and acquire Java for you, pass an installation endpoint ID to the start command

server start javaVersion=openjdk8

or set it in your server.json

server set jvm.javaVersion=openjdk8

or set a default for all servers

config set server.defaults.jvm.javaVersion=openjdk8

To review what possible IDs you can use to dial in your exact Java version, read the docs on our Java endpoint. You don't need to manually install Java CommandBox will do that for you. You just need to provide a valid ID so CommandBox knows what you want.

In some cases you might not want to interact with the command line manually to setup an environment, in particular in production setups. If you prefer to setup your server via a server.json file, the same syntax for valid IDs applies to setting your JVM ID:

{
    "JVM":{
        "javaVersion":"openjdk11_jre_x64_linux_hotspot_jdk-11.0.13+8"
    }
}

Java Namespace

To make it easier for you to manage the Java installations CommandBox makes for you, we have a namespace of commands you can use. The Java versions CommandBox installs automatically for your servers to use are stored in a folder under your CommandBox home. CommandBox manages this folder for you. You can change where the system Java installation go like so:

config set server.javaInstallDirectory=C:/path/to/JREs/

java search

Search the AdoptOpenJDk API for available versions of Java for you to use.