Creating ‘vhosts’ when setting up a Lucee dev environment

Previously when setting up a dev environment using Adobe Coldfusion I would set up multiple development sites on the same Coldfusion install using Apache vhosts. There are other ways to do this using vms or containers, but I find keeping a local dev environment as simple as possible works best for me. If the sites are all Coldfusion, I put them together in one install. (If I’m working with a different technology, then its time to set up a separate dev environment for that, just not a new environment per-site.)

Once I moved to Lucee development, I wanted to replicate the same sort of thing using Apache Tomcat. The problem I had was that Tomcat doesn’t call them “vhosts” so it took a while to Google the correct term!

The following process is how I set up multiple dev sites under one Lucee install:

Step 1)

First, we will need to edit the server.xml file.  This file is located here for me:
c:\Lucee-express\conf\server.xml
But it might also be located here: /data/lucee/tomcat/conf/server.xml
The server.xml file may be in a slightly different place for you, but its always in the conf directory.

Add the following XML inside the “<Engine>” section

<Host name="YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME" appBase="webapps"
unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" >
<Context path="" docBase="PATH_TO_WEBROOT" />
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs"
prefix="access_log" suffix=".txt"
pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" />
</Host>

Step 2)

Update your hosts file with YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME so that your browser will point to your local server instead of going out to the internet.

To your hosts file, add the entry:

127.0.0.1 YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME

Step 3)

restart Lucee

Finished!

Go to your browser and type “http://YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME”  Lucee should respond with the content in the PATH_TO_WEBROOT directory.  You may need to add a port # if your install of Lucee is configured to run on something other than port 80. My environment is configured to use port 8888 so I would need to type “http://YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME:8888“

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