I have been using Railo in development now for around 7 months, I have found it to be very stable and reliable. The way I have been deploying Railo onto my environment was through a windows installer I created using Inno-setup this allowed me to not only install Railo but Tomcat, Probe, a JDK and other application specific to my needs for development. Lately I was looking for a way to combine the usefulness of Tomcat with the parsing of Railo without deploying Railo on Tomcat as a web application. I came across a brilliant article by Sean Corfield You can find it here and paired with Sean’s article I also came across Jamie Krug’s excellent article Railo JARs on JBoss (or Tomcat) I would recommend these articles to anyone thinking of using a multi-web configuration.

My reasons for blogging this out are to hopefully provide solutions to some of the problems you may find when going through these steps, because as you will no doubt have seen Sean’s and Jamie’s articles have not been updated in some time although I will say these guys appear regularly on the Railo Google Group as do I now. So if you have any questions first search through the posts there after registering, then post and I’m sure one of us in the group will get back to you.

First Things First

I would recommend following Sean’s article if you are deploying a development environment, nothing against Jamie’s just Sean’s suited my needs better. When following Sean’s article I found that upon completion and starting the Tomcat service for the first time I had a SAXParseException on further examination I found this to be down to the encoding type set in tomcat-users.xml, by changing the encoding type to UTF-8 from CP1252 this cleared the error and allowed me to keep the apache-xml-xerces.jar.

Starting Tomcat for the First Time

OK this part is not hard but you may or may not know what to expect within your webapps (or whichever directory is defined for your applications) directory. What will happen now is, for every application you have defined within your webapps directory you will have a WEB-INF directory created containing the Railo web admin files. Navigate to (whatever your tomcat is set up as / your webapp/railo-context/admin/web.cfm) this should put you on the web administrator page for your application all changes made here will only affect the application you entered in the URL.

Server Settings

You can access the Server settings by clicking Server Administrator link that is ever present within the Web Administrator page Beware these settings will affect all applications upon your new Railo Tomcat multi web installation.