After yet another long period of silence, New Atlanta gave me a good reason to write another entry. Newatlanta just released the next version of theire awesome coldfusion server, Bluedragon 7.

So read on how to get the goodness that is Bluedragon 7 to play nicely with Ubuntu.

Prepare the folder into which you want to install Bluedragon for some reason I like to install my coldfusion servers into /opt but feel free to go with the default, you just have to adjust the following examples accordingly.

Visit the New Atlanta site and download the latest version of Bluedragon 7 for Linux at the time of writing the downloaded file is called: BlueDragon_Server_JX_70_339-Linux.sh

Make the file executable:

Execute the bluedragon installer.

For Ubuntu Desktop (With GUI):

For Ubuntu Server (Headless):

Excute the Bluedragon installer (Ubuntu Headless)

Follow the prompts when asked where to install bluedragon specify:

/opt/bluedragon7

That's it!

To test if the installation was successful crank up the server:

Configure Bluedragon to Run as a NON-Root User

It is usualy not a good idea to run the bluedragon server with a root account, especially so in a production environment.

Create a user group for bluedragon

sudo groupadd bdragon

Create a user for bluedragon. (we also set the home directory to the bluedragon install folder.)

sudo useradd -d '/opt/bluedragon7' -c 'BlueDragon Server' -s /bin/sh -g bdragon bdragon 

Lock the bluedragon account

sudo passwd -l bdragon
 Give the bluedragon account ownership to the server files: 
sudo chown -R bdragon.bdragon /opt/bluedragon7

Read on how to modify the start script to use the newly created account.

Starting Bluedragon at Boot time.

We need a ubuntu friendly boot up script for bluedragon, luckily the installer does most of the work for us, however it is placed in the wrong folder and needs some small changes.

Move the bluedragon startup script to a suitable location for Ubuntu:

sudo mv /etc/rc.d/init.d/BlueDragon_Server /etc/init.d

We now need to make some small changes to this script to make it work with ubuntu so open this script up with your favourite editor:

The comment out this line:

If you want to run as a not-root user (see configure Bluedragon to Run as a NON-Root User above) add the line:

bduser=bdragon

The final script looks like this:

Now bind the script into the ubuntu run time system:

Done!

If you get the following error message when running the startup script:

You need to change the permission on the bluedragon server files: