Welcome!

Welcome to ColdFusion! This page is designed to walk you through some of the features and areas of your *** ColdFusion VirtualMachine (VM), explain how to add URLs to your site beyond your initial staging hostname, and link you to other resources.

Suggestions are always appreciated, so please let us know if there is material that is unclear, could be improved, or additions that we should make to this page. Thank you!

Initial Layout of Your Site

Every ColdFusion VM site starts out with a directory structure much like this:

admin/

This is the "administration" area of your site. It is restricted via CU WebAuth to the permit created for you when your instance is created, and to the CIT ColdFusion support staff's permit. Currently it contains a couple of utilities designed to make managing your ColdFusion site easier.

wdaccesseditor

This is a utility for editing and configuring any CUWebAuth or Apache-based access control file on your site. It also provides an example/template of the access control directives for using CUWebAuth to control permissions to your site.

More information about using ht/wdaccess files is available at the ht/wdaccess page.

cgi-bin/

This is the traditional cgi-bin directory for placement of Perl or Python CGI scripts. There are two example CGI scripts available from the splash page to provide environment information and to provide a quick "getting started" example.

styles/

This is the stylesheet directory for the Cornell Identity styles as provided from the Visual Identity Site. They are used as part of the splash page, though you of course are free to add your own, use a different style or remove the directory entirely.

index.php

The default index file in your document root is the splash/information page you see when you visit your staging URL provided at account creation. This page is full of links and information for using the environment, getting more help and documentation, and to provide information about your instance and its configuration.

Getting connected to upload content

The ColdFusion hosting service uses a protocol called WebDAV to provide file transfer services. It is similar in idea to FTP, but slightly different in several key ways, most significantly in that it ties in with CU WebAuth - you are able to restrict file management access to directories within your instance on a per-NetID or per-permit basis.

Your ColdFusion splash page, available by default at the staging URL provided when your instance is created, has the links you need to access your instance's WebDAV connection.

Both Windows and Macintosh have built-in WebDAV support in the operating system. Windows makes WebDAV available via Network Folders. Macintosh has WebDAV support in the Finder.

More details for getting set up with WebDAV in Windows network places are available here.

General directions for Windows and Macintosh are available here.

If you prefer, there are also several excellent third-party applications available for WebDAV connections, particularly for Macintosh, including Cyberduck, Transmit, Coda, Goliath, and more. Windows support at the moment is primarily limited to the Network Places folders provided within the operating system.

Permits and Access Control

Instance Permits

By default, your ColdFusion account will come with a permit of the form cit.lamp.*. The initial membership of this permit will be the primary contact, the secondary contact, and all additional authorized users listed on the signup form. Additionally, the primary and secondary contacts for the instance will also have the update privilege to update membership to the permit via the permit interface at http://paw1.cit.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/permit.cgi

DAV Access Control

Access to the key generation page of DAVPortal is restricted to valid-user. Access to the DAV share itself by default is restricted to the permit created with your ColdFusion instance. This is to allow the use of the require netid directive in combination with DAVPortal. Though anyone with a NetID can receive a DAVPortal key for your instance, by default, only those in the permit will be able to actually access the share. The rest of the configuration is up to you - please feel free to adjust it to your needs through the use of .wdaccess files (see "Opening and Restricting Access", below).

Opening and Restricting Access

Please see the guide available here.

Adding additional pages to your site

A note on layouts

Roughly speaking, a hostname like yoursite.cit.cornell.edu will point to a folder on the filesystem, so that visitors of http://yoursite.cit.cornell.edu will see the contents of that folder.

A recommended layout is to use subfolders to organize your site, rather than to put all of your pages in the base /htdocs directory. Your splash page will show information like:

Home Directory
 Using getenv("DOCUMENT_ROOT") shows /infra/lamp/cust/lampuser1/htdocs.

Organizing your site into folders like...

and so forth allows for your provided staging URL (something like yoursite-lamp.cit.cornell.edu) to remain an "information area" launchpad with the splash page and administration area in /admin, and allows you to easily organize and configure several sites within your instance.

However, you are of course free to organize your site in the best way possible for you; this is just a suggested layout based on successful site development and organization in other hosted environments here at CIT.

Adding additional URLs

When you are ready to add or move additional URLs like yoursite.cornell.edu to point at your site, please submit a request to webservices-l, with at least a day or two of notice to ensure that we have time to coordinate DNS moves and configuration updates. If you are moving an existing URL, the more notice you can provide, the better.

When you request an additional URL be setup, we need to know a few things:

1. Name of the URL (e.g. yoursite.cornell.edu)
   Note: If this is a new 3-part domain (something.cornell.edu vs. something.cit.cornell.edu or something.ohr.cornell.edu, etc.), there is a special process associated with requesting and receiving the domain. More information is available here.
2. Folder on your ColdFusion space that it should point to
   If you are using folders to organize your sites, this would be something like htdocs/yoursite1 for yoursite1.cit.cornell.edu; if you are using your site root for your site, then it would just be the root htdocs folder
3. Any special settings you may need as part of the setup
   While you should have access to configure Kerberos/CUWA and redirects, etc. in your htaccess files for your site on a per-directory basis, if there are any settings that need to be in the main Apache configuration, please let us know.
4. Date/time of requested launch, if applicable
   DNS updates go out on every third hour; updates are usually visible on campus within an hour of updates. Therefore, if you wanted a site to launch the morning of 3/14, you might request the 6 AM DNS push, which would be visible on campus by 7 AM.

More Information

Apache configuration information for use within your htaccess files: httpd.apache.org

Using CU Web Auth to open or restrict access to your application: Confluence