Setup Adobe ColdFusion in Docker

Adobe ColdFusion just saw it's newest release hit the scene: ColdFusion 2025. This release continues a trend that's been occuring for the past few years; encouraging growth and continual improvements.

One area where ColdFusion has seen intense growth is in local developer experience.

Nowadays, you can setup a Visual Studio Code environment and run a ColdFusion server in Docker to easily manage a free and easy to configure programming environment.

Let's explore how to set that up.

Docker

We'll first start with a pretty fundamental prerequisite: Installing Docker.

You can choose between Docker Desktop GUI and the Docker Engine CLI. Follow the installation steps for one of the tools to get started.

Regardless of the tool you have selected, you should be able to access the docker CLI command.

We can use this docker utility to create a container for ColdFusion using the following command:

docker container create --name coldfusion -p 8500:8500 -p 7071:7071 -p 45564:45564 -p 8122:8122 -e acceptEULA=YES -e password=YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE -v LOCAL_PATH_HERE:/app adobecoldfusion/coldfusion:latest

docker container create --name coldfusion -p 8500:8500 -p 7071:7071 -p 45564:45564 -p 8122:8122 -e acceptEULA=YES -e password=ColdFusion123 -v C:\Users\crutchcorn\git\ColdFusion\webroot:/app adobecoldfusion/coldfusion:latest

This command:

• Names the created container coldfusion
• Forwards four ports needed for ColdFusion from the container to the host operating system
• Accepts the EULA for ColdFusion
• Sets YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE as the password for the admin account you'll use to configure the ColdFusion dashboard
• Exposes the host machine's LOCAL_PATH_HERE folder as an empty folder you'll use to upload files to your ColdFusion instance.

Now that we have our container created, we can start it using the command:

docker start coldfusion

You can configure much more on the ColdFusion container. To do this, please follow the ColdFusion docs for Docker Images

Looking at the ColdFusion dashboard

Once the container is started you can go to localhost:8050 to see a directory listing of the ColdFusion server:

While this isn't overly helpful on its own, it tells you that ColdFusion is running properly.

From there, you can access http://localhost:8500/CFIDE/administrator/ to get to the admin portal.

On this screen, you'll type in the password you passed to the docker create command earlier.

This will show the rest of the dashboard for you to configure ColdFusion with:

While you can deep-dive into configuring ColdFusion, we'll leave the settings all as defaults for now. For more information on configuring ColdFusion, refer to the official docs

Setting up Visual Studio Code

To use ColdFusion with Visual Studio Code (VSCode), we'll:

• Install VSCode from their site
• Install Java 18 from their site
• Set the JAVA_HOME environmental variable
• Install the "Adobe ColdFusion Builder" extension

Once this is configured, we should see the "Cf" logo in our VSCode's sidebar:

Adding a server

Once the extension is installed, we'll press "Add Server" to add a reference to our local ColdFusion Docker installation:

While this might look daunting at first, the only things we'll need to configure are:

• Server Name: A nickname for our server
• Host Name: Set it to localhost
• WebServer Port: Set it to 8500
• Application Server: Leave it as "CF+Tomcat Bundle"
• RDS User Name: Set it to admin
• RDS Password: Set it to the password we passed to the Docker container (YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE)
• Type: Set to "Is Remote"

Once completed, our "General Settings" page should look like this:

We can verify that the setup is done properly by pressing Test Connection. If successful, we'll see a prompt that "Test connection was successful":

Once verified, we can press "Finish" and see the following:

Opening a workspace

To start working on our ColdFusion project, we'll need to click on Create Project in the ColdFusion Builder extension:

This will prompt you to create a name for the workspace - we'll call ours "Webroot":

Finally, it will ask you to select a folder. Select the path we originally passed to Docker (LOCAL_PATH_HERE).

Once this is done, it will open the folder you selected in VSCode and generate a few required files for you:

Uploading files

To run your first program with ColdFusion, let's add an index.cfm file to the root of the folder we referenced in our docker create command:

<!-- index.cfm --><cfscript>function testStuff(){    writeOutput(NOW());}testStuff();</cfscript>

Then reload localhost:8050 to see the current date displayed to the server.

Hint

Make sure to open the LOCAL_PATH_HERE folder in VSCode so you can see the syntax highlighting applied properly!