Replacing nginx With CommandBox In ColdFusion Dev Environment

I can’t find Gavin’s original tutorial, but I can at least show you what I was doing. In my docker-compose.yaml file, I had two services: nginx and cfml. The nginx container had to mount the cfml file system (/cfml/app/wwwroot) in order to determine if a requested URL mapped to a physical file; and, then to rewrite the request when no file was present.

Here’s a truncated version of my docker-compose.yaml file — again note that both services are mounting directories out of the ./cfml/app directory:

services:

  #NGINX container, proxies CFML website.
  nginx:
    build:
      context: "./nginx/docker/"
      dockerfile: "Dockerfile"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - "./nginx/docker/config:/etc/nginx"
      # Locally, we need to mount the app code so that the URL rewriting will be able to
      # tell if a file exists before attempting to rewrite the request to the path-info.
       - "./cfml/app/wwwroot:/opt/sites/default"
     depends_on:
       cfml:
         condition: service_healthy

  # CFML website.
  cfml:
    build:
      context: "./cfml/docker/"
      dockerfile: "Dockerfile"
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - "./cfml/app:/app"

Inside nginx, my URL rewrite rules were quite simple. When a request to a non-existent file came through, I rewrote the request to point at /index.cfm and appended the original request URL as the new cgi.path_info value:

################### REWRITE: SES RULES #####################
    # Rewrite for URL Mappings
    # If you don't use SES urls you could do something like this
    # location ~ \.(cfm|cfml|cfc)(.*)$ {
    location @rewrite {
        rewrite ^/(.*)? /index.cfm/$1 last;
        rewrite ^ /index.cfm last;
    }

    ################### LOCATION: ROOT #####################
    location / {
        # First attempt to serve request as file or directory, else it sends it to the @rewrite location
        try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite;
    }

This way, when a request to:

/about/about-ben-nadel.htm

… come through, the nginx container sees that no such file exists and rewrites it to be:

/index.cfm/about/about-ben-nadel.htm

I’m pretty sure I also had to generate a self-signed SSL certificate and load it into the nginx container; but, I couldn’t even tell you how I did that. Gavin outlined it in his original post and I just followed his instructions.

As a final note, I’m also pre-baking the ColdFusion engine into my cfml image. Normally, with a CommandBox container, the specified CFML engine version is downloaded on every start. Which makes the startup times somewhat frustrating. Thankfully Ortus provides a way to run the setup script using the FINALIZE_STARTUP flag; and then captures the state into the resultant Docker image.

To be clear, I don’t know how to do this — Claude Code is the one that figured it out for me. But this is what my Dockerfile now looks like:

FROM ortussolutions/commandbox:jdk17

# The application webroot within the mounted /app volume. This is baked into the finalized
# startup script during the build, so changing it requires a rebuild (docker compose build).
ENV APP_DIR=/app/wwwroot

# Copy the server.json so that CommandBox can pre-install the Adobe ColdFusion engine
# during the Docker build. This uses the FINALIZE_STARTUP flag to generate an authoritative
# startup script, which means CommandBox doesn't have to re-download the ColdFusion engine
# or re-evaluate the server configuration on every container start.
COPY ./server.json /app/wwwroot/server.json
RUN export FINALIZE_STARTUP=true && \
	$BUILD_DIR/run.sh && \
	unset FINALIZE_STARTUP

As you can see, it’s copying the server.json file into the container and then running the setup script. When I build my cfml image, the Adobe ColdFusion 2025 engine is downloaded and saved. And, whenever I start a new container from said image, the ACF engine is already embedded and the startup times are significantly faster.

The trade-off being that anytime I make changes to the server.json file, I now have to rebuild the image since nothing is automatically picked-up by the running container. At least, that’s my understanding.