My Experience with Lion and CF9

I'm going to share my experience with you so you can either try to get a little farther than I did, or wait until Adobe supports Lion officially (Recommended).

There were three basic hurdles to get CF server to run on Lion and all but one of them becomes a show stopper.

1.  The first thing you'll trip over are the permission changes in apache, even if you had web sharing turned on, your sites directory and of your localhosts will be screwed.

To overcome that bit you'll need to add a block to user.conf like so:

Directory "your/path/is/different/than/mine"

    Options Indexes MultiViews

    AllowOverride None

    Order allow,deny

    Allow from all

/Directory

At this point, you should be able to get to localhost and bring up your default site as long as it is not using CF.

2. One thing you have to understand about Lion is the big change in permissions. A number of directories that used to allow admin to read and write no longer allow this.  For our purposes we're mostly concerned with /Library/WebServer/Documents/ - I installed the developer edition of the enterprise version of CF 9.01, and this (I believe) was the default location where the admin was installed.  Post Lion migration, your user (admin) account will no longer be able to write to this location and CF will choke.  There are two choices at this point, you can muck around with permissions or you can uninstall JRun4/CF and install the admin in another writeable location.  I elected to reinstall in my case just to try to adhere to the new rules imposed by Lion.  The root user could in fact continue to do anything in this location, but my normal user is simply an admin.

The install works fine writing to the Application directory, the only bit you have to change is where your administrator will be.  Again, it defaults to /Library/WebServer/Documents/, and that's what you have to change.  I chose a location I created under my user directory.  I found that it was best to write a new alias in my httpd.conf file and to test and restart apache after the CF uninstall.

3. The final hurdle was this: Once you clear the installation hurdle, you can bring up the admin, add data sources, and so on, but what you can't do is get to the System Information screen.  In my case it just hung forever.

I was able to bring up all my local development sites, but there were various quirks, cfscript that worked perfectly before would break,  some pages were fast as ever, others were dog slow.  Since I downloaded the installer fresh today I presume I was on the latest, but maybe not.  The bottom line is this:  After I installed Lion and opened up CF Builder for the first time (Eclipse) the OS knew I needed a java runtime and installed it for me.  I couldn't descern if this was the same one CF was using or not, but one of two conditions exist.  Either CF is using it, in which case CF is choking internally on the one provided by Apple, or it's using one packaged with JRun, which must be incompatiable with something in Lion.

I could not resolve the issues I had running various local sites.   Where everything worked without a hitch before Lion, the system was intermitently slow, or would just hang, and the most vexing indication of that was simple trying to bring up the System Information page with CF Admin itself.

So that is my sad tale, I couldn't live with the hanging and slowness and decided to restore my system to its pre lion install state so I can keep working efficiently.  My hope is that better minds than mine at Adobe will be able to update CF so it runs well on Lion, or maybe someone will read this and push the ball down the field a little more.

Best,

-john