Deployment

Deploying ColdBox to production — best practices, production checklist, and engine guidance.

ColdBox applications deploy on three engines — BoxLang (recommended), Adobe ColdFusion, and Lucee. This page covers the engine-agnostic essentials; per-engine specifics live in BoxLang Runtimes and Adobe & Lucee.

Server Requirements

A JVM (BoxLang and Lucee 6+ run on modern JDKs; Adobe CF 2023 bundles its own)
CommandBox for server orchestration (recommended for all engines)
Your application's dependencies installed: box install

Production Configuration

Turn debug output off

In production, debugMode must be false in your ColdBox class — debug mode exposes framework internals in error output. Environment detection can do this automatically:

// config/ColdBox.bx
environments : {
    development : "localhost,^dev\.",
    production  : ".*"
}

function development(){
    coldbox.debugMode = true
}

Protect reinitialization

Never expose ?fwreinit=1 publicly. Set a strong reinitPassword and reinit through it:

coldbox.reinitPassword = getSystemSetting( "CB_REINIT_PASSWORD" )

Externalize secrets

Keep credentials out of source control with a .env file and getSystemSetting() — see System Settings.

Enable caching

handlerCaching, eventCaching, and viewCaching should be true in production
Configure real CacheBox caches — the default in-memory cache doesn't scale across instances

Health Checks

Give your load balancer / uptime monitor a dedicated route:

// config/Router.bx
route( "/health" ).toResponse( () => { "status" : "ok" } )

Scheduled Tasks & Workers

Scheduled tasks run in-process — use server fixation (onOneServer()) on multi-instance deployments so tasks don't duplicate
cbq workers are long-running processes — supervise them (systemd, Docker restart policy, platform process manager) and restart on every deploy