Today I wanted to give ColdFusion 8 debugging a try.

So, I started followed the instructions on how to setup the enviornment for debugging. After installing ColdFusion 8 extensions for Eclipse, I went to enable debugger in ColdFusion Administrator. The CF administrator instructs that:

You must specify this debugger port in the JVM settings of your application server, for example: -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005, and restart the server.

If I was using JRun, I know that these options can be added in the jvm.config file.

But as I use JBoss, it took me little bit to figure out where I need to make these changes.

JBoss does not have jvm.config file. You have specify the JVM settings in $JBOSS_HOME/bin/run.conf

You need to look for the portion where JAVA_OPTS variable is setup. Add the following to the existingﾠ JAVA_OPTS

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005

Restart the server and these settings become active.

For complete instructions on how to setup ColdFusion 8 Debugger visitﾠ this article on Adobe DevNet:ﾠ Using the ColdFusion 8 step-through debugger for Eclipse

Once it gets going, it is quite useful. Reminds me of the good old days when CF debugging used to be a part of CF Studio.

PS: There is this interesting article on 6 Common Errors in Setting Java Heap Size. While talking about the common errors, it also indicates how to setup Java options/JVM arguments in a whole range of environments.

Comments

martin wrote on 06/06/09 8:42 PM

I have figured this out myself too.

But Eclipse does not find the debugger,
Test Debugger and Test Connection both fail. In my wrapper.log i see that the Coldfusion debugger is listening to port 2481. I have tried to set the debugger port in eclipse preferences to 8005, 8003, 5005 and 2481 to no avail. My Coldfusion gui is available through http://localhost:8080/cfusion/...
Did you had similar problems?

martin wrote on 06/06/09 10:05 PM

oops, just realized that this thread is from 2008 and not 2009. sorry for necromancy.

Indy Nagpal wrote on 06/11/09 8:19 AM

Hi Martin

It so happened that I needed to run the debugger again today on JBoss 5.1.0GA with ColdFusion 8.0.1.

I can confirm that the debugger works as expected. There were no problems.

I'm sure you are missing a step or two as part of setting the debugging environment. The Adobe article link in the blog entry has fairly accurate description of what you need to do.

A couple of things that I needed to do were: a) Made sure RDS running, b) Setup the Eclipse debugging environment correctly (based on the Adobe article).

martin wrote on 06/12/09 5:16 PM

Yes, i missed to tell the debugger to listen to port 80. I access my local coldfusion through apache as a virtual host (take a look at your own article about JBoss, cf8 and railo). Stupid mistake

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