When working with ColdFusion on Linux, you may encounter a situation where you want to make the contents of the CFIDE folder available to all sites that are hosted on that server. The reason you might want to do this is for things like CFFORM to work properly on a host that doesn’t physically have the CFIDE directory located in that site.

The solution for this is an Apache Alias. Add an alias to the Apache httpd.conf file similar to this:

• Alias /CFIDE /var/apache/htdocs/CFIDE/
• Alias /cfide /var/apache/htdocs/CFIDE/

Adjust the second path to actually point to where your primary CFIDE folder is located. It’s usually your default site, but it can be changed during the install.

Further, for best security practices, take a look at Pete Freitag’s guide to locking down the CFIDE directory. The PDF file he provides offers cusotm apache configs for locking down unused CFIDE services and thus lowering the attack surface that bad guys might use to access your box:

http://www.petefreitag.com/item/758.cfm