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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:
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.
If you have Tuckey rewrites enabled AND use the Undertow predicate-based server rules, the server rules will fire BEFORE the Tuckey rewrites.
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.
Ad-hoc rule array in server.json
External rules files in server.json in the order defined
Ad-hoc rule array in config setting server.defaults
External rules files in config setting server.defaults in the order defined
CommandBox built-in rules (web.blockCFAdmin, web.blockSensitivePaths)
Any module listening to server interceptions can inject their rules wherever they please in the array.
server.json RulesYou 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.
External rule files with a .json suffix will be expected to be a valid JSON file containing an array of strings. Ex:
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.
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.
server.defaults RulesLike all other config server defaults, they follow the same pattern as the server.json file.
You can comment out any rule (whether it's in JSON or a text file) by proceeding it with a pound sign (#).
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.
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.
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.
SSL Renegotiation, when enabled, will disable HTTP/2 AND TLSv1.3. Both of these are not compatible with SSL Renegotiation.
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.
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.
You can enable the client cert auth mechanism like so:
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.
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.
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:
You may provide a single Subject DN ...
or an array of Subject DNs to filter on...
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.
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 ...
or an array of Issuer DNs to filter on...
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 ConfigurationHere 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.
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.
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 is built on a simple username/password list and challenges the user to provide credentials in their browser. Read more here
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
If you have a common static file you need to serve, you can add your own custom extensions to the list like so:
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.
Configuration can be set at several different levels:
Passed as parameters to the server start command
Stored in a server.json file for that server
Global defaults in the server.defaults config setting
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.
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.
CommandBox's web server supports enabling Basic Auth on your sites.
That will create the following data in your server.json, which will be picked up the next time you start your server.
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.
CommandBox has profiles you can assign to a server when you start it to configure the default settings. This is to provide easy secure-by-default setups for your production servers, and to make it easier to switch between a development mode and production mode.
There are 3 currently supported profiles. Custom profiles will be added as a future feature.
Production - Locked down for production hosting
Development - Lax security for local development
None - For backwards compat and custom setups. Doesn't apply any web server rules
You can set the profile for your server in your server.json
Which create this property
Or you can specify it when starting the server like so:
If a profile is not set, these rules are used to choose the default value:
If there is an env var called environment, it is used to set the default profile (same convention as ColdBox MVC)
If the site is bound on localhost, default the profile to "development". Localhost is defined as any IP address starting with 127.
If neither of the above are true, the default profile is "production". This makes CommandBox servers secure by default.
When profile is set to "production", the following defaults are provided:
web.directoryListing = false
web.blockCFAdmin = external
web.blockSensitivePaths = true
web.blockFlashRemoting = true
When profile is set to "development", the following defaults are provided:
web.directoryListing = true
web.blockCFAdmin = false
web.blockSensitivePaths = true
web.blockFlashRemoting = true
When profile is set to "none", the following defaults are provided:
web.directoryListing = false
web.blockCFAdmin = false
web.blockSensitivePaths = false
web.blockFlashRemoting = false
The defaults above only apply if you do not have am explicit server.json or server.defaults config setting. If you have an explicit setting, it will override the profile's default. Therefore, if you set the profile toproduction but set web.blockCFAdmin to false, your CF administrator will be public, but the remaining production defaults will still be applied. This allows even the default profiles to be customizable.
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
If you want to customize the rules above, simply turn them off and include the rules directly in your server.json where you can modify them as you see fit.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Since your custom rules are processed BEFORE the built-in rules, that also means that you have the ability to accidentally bypass security rules by applying another rule that intercepts the request! By default a custom rule won't block subsequent rules from firing unless you rewrite the request or use the special done handler.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Handler parameters that accept an array use the Java array literal syntax which is a comma-delimited list of values in curly braces.
More than one handler can be run by wrapping them in curly braces and using semicolons between them
A chain of handlers can be configured for the true AND false evaluation of a single predicate using the “else” keyword.
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.
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.
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:
Complex conditions can be constructed with more than one predicate using the keywords “and” or “or”.
A predicate can be negated with the keyword “not”
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.
%{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)
Use an exchange attribute like you would a variable as the parameter to a handler or predicate.
Attributes, Cookie, query params, request headers, and response header names are not case sensitive.
These are all equivalent:
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:
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.
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:
You can start your server to listen for SSL connections too.
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 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.
You can start your server to listen for AJP connections too.
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.
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://.
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.
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
Full list here:
Full list here:
CommandBox's AJP listener (provided by Undertow) is already protected against the . However, if you would like to set up an AJP secret as well to ensure all requests coming into the AJP listener are from a trusted source, you can do by setting the web.ajp.secret property.
For this to work, you must also configure your AJP proxy in your web server to send the same secret! For requests received to the AJP listener which do not contain the secret, a 403 status code will be returned. You can customize the output of the 403 page via the settings.
The AJP secret is implemented via a . Feel free to add your own server rule instead of this setting if you want to customize how it works.
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.
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)
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)
or
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.
The user's browser will ONLY be able to send client certs signed/trusted by one of the CAs you specify. All other certs will be rejected. If your mode is set to REQUIRED, that means your user would never be able to reach any CF pages at all (unless you are using SSL renegotiation which is covered here.
server.json ConfigurationHere's an example of what your config could look like:
If both a trust store AND individual trusted CA's are provided, CommandBox will use all of them.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
Or in the server.json as:
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:
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.
Or in the server.json as:
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.
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.
For compatibility reasons as of version 5.3.0, relative alias paths can also be relative to the web root, if that is not where the server.json lives. CommandBox will check if the folder exists relative to the web root FIRST, and if not, it will then check relative to the folder the server.json lives in.
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.
Here's how to create aliases from the server set command:
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).
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
Now URLs like
can now simply be
In server.json
info The default rewrite file can be found in
~\.CommandBox\cfml\system\config\urlrewrite.xml
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
Then, fire up your server with its custom rewrite rules:
In server.json
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.
or
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:
Please see the docs here on what's supported:
info For more information on custom rewrite rules, consult the Tuckey docs.
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.
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.
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.
The Tuckey Rewrite library that CommandBox uses under the hood. It has some extra settings that CommandBox allows you to use.
To monitor your custom rewrite file for changes without needing to restart the server, use this setting.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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:
You can set error pages via the server set command like this:
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:
An example of getting the original missing path in a 404 in Lucee would look like this:
In Adobe ColdFusion, you can access ServletRequest Attributes directly via the CGI scope:
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.
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 that, when true, will trigger GZip for the request.
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.
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.
And the way to specify this in a portable manner in your `server.json` is like so:
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.
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.
The default welcome files are the usual index.cfm, index.htm, index.html, etc but you can override this with the welcomeFiles setting in your server.json by providing a comma-delimited list of files that you would like CommandBox to look for when a user hits a directory on a running server.
This setting is a complete override of the defaults, so you need to specify the full list.
By default, a CommandBox server will not show the contents of a directory that doesn't have an index file. You can enable directory browsing for a single server with
And you can enable it for all servers by default with
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:
Which creates the following
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.
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)
Point CommandBox to an existing java install like so:
To set the default version of Java for all the servers you start on your machine, use the global config setting defaults.
To let CommandBox take over and acquire Java for you, pass an installation endpoint ID to the start command
or set it in your server.json
or set a default for all servers
To review what possible IDs you can use to dial in your exact Java version, read the . 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:
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:
Search the AdoptOpenJDk API for available versions of Java for you to use.
You can filter the version, jvm, os, CPU arch, type, and release. Most of those parameters default to match your local system. For instance, running this command on Windows will only return Windows versions. To open up the search, pass nothing to that filter.
List the installed Java installations for you to start servers with. If you have set a global default Java version it will be marked in the list.
You may change the global default Java version for your servers with this command.
You can pre-install a Java version so it's ready to go the next time you start a server with this command. This differs from the normal package install command in that it doesn't install to the current working directory, but into the core server JRE folder that CommandBox manages for you. Use the --setDefault flag to also set the newly installed Java version as the global default for all servers.
You can remove a java installation so it doesn't take up space on your hard drive. Use the FULL ID that shows in the java list command to uninstall.
Note, the download will still be in your artifacts cache. Also, if you start a server up again that asks for a Java installation you've uninstalled, CommandBox will simply re-install it again.
By default, the web server in CommandBox will follow the case sensitivity of the underlying file system. So, when on Windows /FiLe.TxT will still load an actual file called /file.txt. But on Linux, the case in the browser would need to match that of the file system. CommandBox allows you to force case sensitivity to be ON or OFF for a server, overriding the server's file system.
Note, this controls all access of static file, such as images, js, css, txt, etc as well as the initial lookup of .cfm files. It will also affect all internal usage of ServletContext.getRealPath( "/myPath.txt" ). It will NOT affect CFML file operations such as <CFFile>, <CFDirectory>, fileRead(), directoryList(), etc. It will also not affect core CF engine functionality such as creating CFCs or cfincluding CFM templates. Any code directly accessing the file system will use the file systems case sensitivity. And creating CFC instance is never case sensitive in CFML.
There is a new setting called web.caseSensitivePaths which has 3 possible values: true, false, or an empty string (default).
To force CommandBox's web server to be case sensitive, even on operating systems like Windows, use the following setting. There is a nominal performance benifit in doing this and can allow a Windows CommandBox server to mimic a Linux server for testing.
To force CommandBox's web server to be case insensitive, even on operating systems like Linux, use the following setting. There is a nominal performance overhead in doing this and can allow a Linux CommandBox server to mimic a Windows IIS server. In this mode, CommandBox will use an internal cache of file system lookups to improve performance. If there are two files of the same name using different case, then you will get whatever file is found first.
Here are some settings for performance tuning your servers
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.
Or as a global setting for all servers:
The built in REST implementation in Adobe ColdFusion and Lucee is usually something you either love or hate. If you love it, you can enable it and customize the paths so it doesn't collide with your app's routes. if you hate it, you can turn it off. The REST servlet will be disabled unless you include a setting like so:
Note that the above setting will take over any URLs starting with /rest or api and you cannot use those routes or folders in your code. This is why it's handy to be able to modify or remove these. On a typical server, this is done via the web.xml, but CommandBox will do it all for you with just the setting above.
CommandBox uses JBoss Undertow to power it's lightweight servlet containers. Undertow also powers JBoss Wildfly and has a lot of configurable options, not all of which have first-class CommandBox settings. These low-level settings come in two different categories:
Undertow Options - Settings that apply to the servlet and web server aspects of Undertow
XNIO Options - Part of the underlying XNIO library which powers all low-level I/O in undertow
Undertow has its own set of options which can be found here:
To set an XNIO option that CommandBox doesn't already expose with a first-class setting, you can set them into your server.json like so:
You can also set global XNIO objects that will apply to all servers. Global options will be appended to server-level options.
XNIO (which is a refined version of NIO (Non-blocking I/O) has its own set of options that apply to the low level network transport functions it provides. You can find the full set of XNIO options here:
To set an XNIO option that CommandBox doesn't already expose with a first-class setting, you can set them into your server.json like so:
You can also set global XNIO objects that will apply to all servers. Global options will be appended to server-level options.
The following JVM Args are supported when starting the embedded server.
You can set the max heap size the server is allowed to have (-Xmx) by passing the heapSize parameter to the start command. This parameter defaults to megabytes but you can specify any valid suffix.
In server.json
You can set the starting heap size for the server (-Xms) by passing the minHeapSize parameter to the start command. This parameter defaults to megabytes but you can specify any valid suffix.
In server.json
You can specify ad-hoc JVM args for the server with the JVMArgs parameter.
In server.json
JVM args can also be set an array of strings which prevents you from needing to escape or quote anything.
Or via the CLI like so:
You can specify ad-hoc options for the underlying Runwar library using the RunwarArgs parameter.
In server.json
Runwar args can also be set an array of strings which prevents you from needing to escape or quote anything.
Or via the CLI like so:
For every server you start, there is a corresponding icon in your PC's system tray. In addition to the menu options you get out of the box, you can add in custom menu items. Menus are defined as nested arrays of structs, where each struct represents a single menu item. A menu item can be informational, have an action, or contain sub menus.
You can customize the tray menus for a server via 3 different methods:
The trayOptions array in a specific server's server.json file. These menu additions will be specific to that server.
The server.defaults.trayOptions config setting. These menu additions will be added to every server you start
A custom CommandBox Module with an interceptor listening to the onServerStart interception point that modifies the serverInfo.trayOptions array.
Each menu item struct can have the following keys. Only label is required.
label - This text appears on the menu and is the unique name
image - A custom image file to use for the icon. Relative paths in the server.json will be relative to the JSON file Relative paths in the global config will be relative to the web root of the server.
disabled - Boolean that greys out menu item and disables any action. Use for informational items.
items - An array that contains a struct of sub menus.
action - This controls what the menu item does when clicked. Possible options are:
openfilesystem - Opens a folder on the file system. Requires path to be set as well.
openbrowser - Opens a URL in your default browser. Requires url to be set as well.
stopserver - Stops the current server
run - Runs an arbitrary native command synchronously. Requires command to be set as well.
runAsync - Runs an arbitrary native command asynchronously Requires command to be set as well.
runTerminal - Runs an arbitrary native command in a new Terminal window. Requires command to be set as well.
path - The file system path to use for the openfilesystem action.
url - The HTTP URL to use for the openbrowser action
command - The native command to run for the run, runAsync, or runTerminal actions.
workingDirectory - The working directory to use for the run, runAsync or runTerminal actions.
shell - Override the native shell to use on your OS. Defaults to your nativeShell config setting.
Commands executed by the run action will display their output in a popup window. The PID of the process is available if running on Java 9 or later. Also, there is a button to kill the process, but your mileage may vary. Only use this option to run command line apps that have console output you want to see.
Commands executed by the runAsync action work like the run action except there is no windows to show you the output. This is what you want to use to fire off an app such as an IDE.
Commands executed by the runTerminal action work like the run action except a new terminal window is opened to run the command. The terminal windows stays open and you can continue to interact with it when the command finishes.
You can customize how your command is run by setting the optional workingDirectory and shell properties. If not set, the working directory will be the web root of the server.
You can nest menus by supplying another array of structs in the items property of a menu. A menu cannot have an action and have sub menus.
Menu items are layered "on top" of existing options whichs mean you can add new sub menu items to an existing top level menu. You can even override the action or image of a built-in menu. Menu items are registered in this order:
Built-in menus
Config setting server defaults
server.json trayOptions
onServerStart interceptor
This example server.json will add a new sub menu into the existing "Open..." top level menu.
There is no way to remove existing menu items via your config settings or server.json. To do that, you'd need to directly manipulate the trayOptions array in an interceptor.
The ID follows the format from the . If the version you set as the default isn't installed yet, CommandBox will install it for you the next time a server starts or you can use the --install flag.
When you start an Adobe or Lucee CF Engine, the WAR CommandBox uses has a stock web.xml baked into it. Sometimes you may want to add custom servlets, servlet mappings, etc into your server. You can override the stock web.xml in part or in total with a file of your own which you specify in the server.json like so:
The path can be absolute or relative to the server.json file. CommandBox will still load the default web.xml from the CF engine, and then it will load your override file on top of the previous settings. This means additional items in your override will be merged into the existing settings, and servlets with the same name as existing default servlets will be completely overridden and replaced.
Here is a list of all the top level items CommandBox will look for in your web.xml file:
Servlets
Servlet mappings
Servlet filters
Server filter mappings
Listeners
Context params
welcome files (only if not in server.json)
error pages (only if not in server.json)
mime types
session config
So if you wanted to replace the default servlet mapping for a Lucee server to also process .html files, you could use an override file like this:
The default behavior is to add or update existing configurations. If you want to remove a servlet or listener from the base file, you can enable the app.webXMLOverrideForce flag.
This will completely remove any configuration from the web.xml that is explicitly provided in your override file. For example, if the default web.xml specifies two servlet filters and you provide an override web.xml with one servlet filter and the force flag is true, both of the default servlet filters will be removed in favor of your one servlet filter from your override file.
If you need something more complex than this-- e.g. simply removing default settings without replacing them, you'll need to create a custom CF engine with a default web.xml of your own design.
When you start a CF server in CommandBox, the default behavior is that the WAR for that version is expanded into a folder inside the server directory inside your CommandBox home. There is a sub folder containing an MD5 hash of the server name and web root concatenated with the server name. Inside of that, is a folder containing the name of the CF Engine followed by the engine version. The result is something like this:
When you start a new version of the CF engine, the old folder is left in place, and a new one is created containing the new WAR. e.g.
This allows you to easily revert back to the previous version as CommandBox automatically handles the server homes for you. Running server forget will remove the entire top level folder containing all the engine versions.
When you start a new server version to replace a previous version, you will get a new server home which also means all settings and manual changes to the old server home will not exist in the new one. if you have commandbox-cfconfig installed, it will automatically copy over all CF config settings that it can handle into the new server home. Any other custom changes you've made such as license files, logs, jars or web.xml modifications will not be brought over.
You can move the server home to a custom folder of your choice with the following setting:
Note, the relative path is relative to the folder that the server.json lives in. This can give you a predictable server home, but comes with a few caveats:
CommandBox will NOT auto-upgrade new versions of the CF engine
If you ask for a new version of the engine, CommandBox will ignore it
You must server forget and remove the server home before you can start a new server in your custom server home.
There is an option that will give you a mix of a custom server home and the default behavior where the server home is automatically placed inside the CommandBox home. This is the app.singleServerHome setting. It defaults to false.
This will create a folder similar to the default behavior above, but WITHOUT the version number appended to the folder name. An example server home would be:
This has the convenience of auto-managing the server home for you, but still come with all the caveats listed above for a custom server home such as requiring you to server forget to upgrade or change versions via CommandBox.
This setting is a CLI-wide config setting that forces CommandBox to only have a single server. This setting was created to simplify our Ortus Docker Images and you likely DON'T want to use this outside of a scenario such as a Docker image where only one server exists. When this is enabled, the first server that is started will be remembered as the only serer that exists. No matter what directory you run start and stop commands from and no matter what name you pass, CommandBox will always perform that action against the single server it has. You can server forget and start another server elsewhere, but there can only be one server at a time. This setting was added to help prevent duplicate servers from getting created in different folders during Docker builds which mixed up the settings.
Every server setting can be overridden by convention by creating environment variables in the shell where you run box. This is idea for CI builds were you want to easily set ports, or tweak settings for your build. You set set these as actual environment variables or Java system properties of the CLI.
The var must start with the text box_server_ and will be followed by the name of the setting.
For nested settings inside of a struct or array you can use underscores to represent dots.
The overrides are applied using the same mechanism that the config set command uses, which means you can also pass JSON directly for complex values.
On OS's like Windows which allow for any manner of special characters, you can provide any string which would also be valid for the config set command. Ex:
When you provide JSON, the append flag will be set to true when adding the configuration to what's already in CommandBox.
Overridden env vars will not be written to the server.json file and will be lost when box stops. They will also take precedence and override any explicit server.json settings already set but will NOT override actual parameters to the server start command.
You've always been able to add ad-hoc Java system properties for a server in your server.json via jvm.args in the format of -Dfoo=bar. There is also a top-level struct that is more readable which does the same thing:
No additional quoting or escaping is needed for spaces or special characters when using this method.
Set these programmatically like so:
Or set them globally for all servers in your config setting server defaults.
Keys will be merged, giving precedence to the server.json values.
There are a few experimental features in Runwar that are available for your servers.
CommandBox uses a custom resource manager in Undertow to resolve "real" paths (relative) in the servlet context with the path on the file system (absolute). This includes log concerning where the root of the WAR is, where the CF engine web root is, and any web aliases. If you enable a --debug or --trace server start, it is possible to get additional low-level information in the logs about every single file path that is resolved through the servlet context's resource manager. This logging is disabled by default since it is quite verbose.
Or in the server.json as:
You can activate a cache for all file path resolution in the resource manager by activating this setting. This is only for production and will eliminate repeated file system hits by your CF engine, such as checking for an Application.cfc file on every request, or testing where the servlet context root is. This will NOT affect any of the CFML fileRead() sort of commands or any code in the CF engine that bypasses the ServletContext and directly hits the file system. The default is false.
Standard Adobe ColdFusion installations have a similar cache of "real" paths from the servlet context that is tied to a setting in the administrator called "Cache Webserver paths" but that setting is not available and does not work on CommandBox servers for some reason..
There is an XNIO file system watcher started for the web root and any virtual directories in your server. This change listener serves two purposes:
Cache invalidation for the servlet path lookup matching
Cache invalidation for welcome file lookups
In normal operations you should have no issues with this, but it has been observed starting a server in a web root with a very large number of files (like over 200,000) can consume a lot of resources, and even cause out of memory errors. The change listener in Undertow can be disabled with this setting:
CommandBox servers use Log4j to process the console logs for a server. The console logs contain
Debugging output from CommandBox
Logging from any Java libraries in use such as Lucee or Undertow
Output from Lucee's systemOutput() BIF
Output from <cfdump var="foo" output="console">
Output from LogBox's Console Appender
This output is visible in the "standard out" for the actual Runwar java process, which is what you see in Docker container logs, or if you start your server with the --console flag. The output is also written file a file appender to the server.out.txt log file inside the CommandBox server home, which is what the server log command uses.
By default Log4j's console and file appender use a PatternLayout with a default pattern of
The Log4j docs explain what valid placeholders exist
You can choose a custom pattern for the pattern layout. This example would put the date/time into every log message:
This example would log ONLY the message with no severity or category:
Note, the color coding of log lines in CommandBox is dependent upon the default Log4j pattern layout.
If you want, you can change the entire appender layout itself to be something other than the PatternLayout. Log4j supports a number of appender layouts plus is configurable with layouts of your own creation, so long as they are visible on the classpath. All of the Log4j 2.x appender layouts are avilable for you to use as well as the JSONTemplateLayout which we also bundle.
You can view all the built in layouts here:
Common options are:
HTMLLayout
JSONTemplateLayout
XMLLayout
CsvLogEventLayout
Rfc5424Layout
Specify the layout like so:
Any settings specific to a layout can be set just like the pattern option above.
Please refer to the Log4j docs to find what the valid options are for a given appender layout.
Note: some of the built in layouts require additional jars which do not ship with CommandBox. You will, need to download these jars separately and specify them to the app.libDirs setting so they are visible to the class loader. For example, the CSV layout requires the Apache Commons commons-csv library which you would specify like so:
There are many ways to pass environment variables into a server. You can set them in your actual OS shell before starting box, set them as CommandBox env vars, use the commandbox-dotenv module to read them from a .env file or many Docker-based options. Just in case you wanted one MORE way to do it, you can also set env vars directly in your server.json file.
These env vars will not be visible in the CommandBox shell like a .env file is, but will be used exclusively when starting the server. They will be visible inside the running server and also present in CommandBox to any interception points or CFConfig while the server is starting.
Note the two CFConfig examples above do the same thing (assuming you have commandbox-cfconfig installed. Any nested keys will be concatenated with underscores when the actual env var is set. Therefore the cfconfig key and nested requestTimeout key will create an env var actually called cfconfig_requestTimeout when the server starts. This is simply a convenience to help you group together related env vars with a matching prefix.
You can see that the web.http.port is using an env var from the env block above it. All env vars in the env block will be added to CommandBox's environment BEFORE the rest of the JSON file is expanded. Env vars in the env block can ALSO reference other pre-existing env vars. In the example above, ${brad} is assuming there is a pre-existing env var of that name set outside this file.
In case anyone is wondering, it's actually possible to override your server.json settings from inside the env block like so:
but we can't imagine why you'd ever want to do that :) That would be the equivalent of setting the following env vars outside of CommandBox:
Adobe ColdFusion 2021 and later have a built in command in their server home called cfpm (ColdFusion Package Manager) used to install modules into the core of the ACF engine.
CommandBox provides a passthrough command called cfpm which will locate the Adobe server and invoke the correct cfpm.bat or cfpm.sh script, passing along whatever arguments you've typed.
The CommandBox cfpm command will use the current working directory of the shell, or intercept data, if run from inside of a package script or server script to figure out which server to apply to. It will also ensure the JAVA_HOME env var is set for the process.
If you need to force cfpm to act upon a specfific CommandBox server, set the following env var before running it:
