Getting Started Guide

The ColdBox HMVC Platform is the de-facto enterprise-level HMVC framework for CFML developers. It's professionally backed, highly extensible, and productive. Getting started with ColdBox is quick and painless. The only thing you need to begin is , a command line tool for CFML developers.

This is a one-page introductory guide to ColdBox. If you are new to MVC or ColdBox, you can also leverage our as well.

IDE Tools

ColdBox has the following supported IDE Tools:

Sublime -
VSCode -
CFBuilder -

Install CommandBox

You can read through our one-page . Or simply grab the CommandBox executable from the and double click it to run.

You should now be seeing a prompt that looks like this:

Create A New Site

Now we're cooking with gas! Let's create a new ColdBox application. CommandBox comes with built-in commands for scaffolding out new sites as well as installing ColdBox and other libraries. We'll start by changing into an empty directory were we want our new app to live. If necessary, you can create a new folder.

CommandBox> mkdir playground --cd

Now let's ask CommandBox to create a new ColdBox app for us.

CommandBox> coldbox create app MyPlayground

You can also issue a coldbox create app help command and get help for the creation command.

File/Folder Conventions

This command will place several new folders and files in your working directory. Let's run the ls command to view them.

CommandBox> ls

Here's a rundown of the important bits.

coldbox - This is the ColdBox framework managed by CommandBox
config/Coldbox.cfc - Your application configuration object
config/Router.cfc - Your application URL Router
handlers - Your controller layer, which in ColdBox they are called event handlers
layouts - Your HTML layouts
models - This holds your model CFCs
modules - This holds the CommandBox tracked modules
modules_app - This holds your app's modules
views - Your HTML views will go here

Start It Up

Now that our shiny new MVC app is ready to go, let's fire it up using the embedded server built into CommandBox. You don't need any other software installed on your PC for this to work. CommandBox has it all!

CommandBox> start --rewritesEnable

In a few seconds, a browser window will appear with your running application. This is a full server with access to the web administrator where you can add data sources, mappings, or adjust the server settings. Notice the handy icon added to your system tray as well. The --rewritesEnable flag will turn on some basic URL rewriting so we have nice, pretty URLs.

Take A Look Around

ColdBox uses easy conventions to define the controllers and views in your app. Let's open up our main app controller in your default editor to have a looksie.

CommandBox> edit handlers/main.cfc

At the top, you'll see a function named "index". This represents the default action that runs for this controller, which in ColdBox land they are referred to as event handlers.

// Default Action
function index(event,rc,prc){
    prc.welcomeMessage = "Welcome to ColdBox!";
    event.setView("main/index");
}

Now let's take a look in the main/index view. It's located int he views folder.

CommandBox> edit views/main/index.cfm

This line of code near the top of the view is what outputs the prc.welcomeMessage variable we set in the controller.

<h1>#prc.welcomeMessage#</h1>

Try changing the value being set in the handler and refresh your browser to see the change.

prc.welcomeMessage = "This is my new welcome message";

Building On

Let's define a new event handler now. Your controllers act as event handlers to respond to requests, REST API, or remote proxies.

Pull up CommandBox again and run this command.

CommandBox> coldbox create handler helloWorld index,add,edit,list

That's it! You don't need to add any special configuration to declare your handler. Now we have a new handler called helloWorld with actions index, add, edit, and list. The command also created a test case for our handler as well as stubbed-out views for each of the actions.

Now, let's re-initialize the framework to pick up our new handler by typing ?fwreinit=1 at the end of the URL.

Let's hit this new controller we created with a URL like so. Your port number will probably be different.

127.0.0.1:43272/helloWorld

Normally the URL would have index.cfm before the /helloWorld bit, but our --rewritesEnable flag when we started the server makes this nicer URL possible.

Install Packages

Here's some useful examples:

BCrypt -- Industry-standard password hashing
cbdebugger -- For debugging Coldbox apps
cbjavaloader - For interacting with Java classes and libraries
cbMarkdown - For writing in markdown
cbMessagebox -- Display nice error/success messages
cborm -- Awesome ORM Services
cb18n -- For multilingual sites
cbt - ColdBox templating language
cbValidation - Back-end validation framework
qb - Fluent query builder and schema builder
route-visualizer - For visualizing your application routes

Install cbmessagebox from the CommandBox prompt like this:

CommandBox> install cbmessagebox

We can see the full list of packages by using the list command.

CommandBox> list
Dependency Hierarchy for myApp (0.0.0)
+-- cbmessagebox (1.0.0)
+-- coldbox (4.0.0)

Right now we can see that our app depends on coldbox and cbmessagebox to run. We'll use our new cbmessagebox module in a few minutes. But first, we'll create a simple Model CFC to round out our MVC app.

Creating A Model

Models encapsulate the business logic your application. They can be services, beans, or DAOs. We'll use CommandBox to create a GreeterService in our new app with a sayHello method.

CommandBox> coldbox create model GreeterService sayHello --open

Tip: The --open is a nice shortcut that opens our new model in our default editor after creating it.

Let's finish implementing the sayHello() method by adding this return statement and save the file.

We can also add the word singleton to the component declaration. This will tell WireBox to only create one instance of our service.

component singleton {

    function sayHello(){
        return 'Hey, you sexy thing!';
    }

}

What is WireBox?

WireBox is a dependency injection framework that is included with ColdBox. It will manage all object creations, persistence and assembling. You don't have to worry about using new or createobject() for CFCs anymore.

Tie It All Together

Ok, let's open up that helloWorld handler we created a while back. Remember, you can hit tab while typing to auto-complete your file names.

CommandBox> edit handlers/helloWorld.cfc

We'll inject our greeterService and the cbmessagebox service into the handler by adding these properties to the top of /handlers/helloWorld.cfc.

What is this magical injection? Injection is a way to get references of other objects placed in the variables scope of other objects. This makes your life easier as you don't have to be creating objects manually or even knowing where they exist.

This will put the instance of our services in the variables scope where we can access it in our action methods.

component {

    property name='greeterService' inject='greeterService';
    property name='messageBox' inject='@cbmessagebox';

    ...
}

And now in our index method, we'll set the output of our service into an info message.

function index( event, rc, prc ){
    messageBox.info( greeterService.sayHello() );
    event.setView( "helloWorld/index" );
}

One final piece. Open up the default layout located in layouts/Main.cfm and find the #renderView()#. Add this line right before it to render out the message box that we set in our handler.

#getInstance( 'messagebox@cbmessageBox').renderIt()#
<div class="container">#renderView()#</div>

Now hit your helloWorld handler one final time with ?fwreinit=1 in the URL to see it all in action! (Again, your port number will most likely be different.

127.0.0.1:43272/helloWorld?fwreinit=1

What's Next?

Congratulations! In a matter of minutes, you have created a full MVC application. You installed a community module from ForgeBox, created a new handler/view and tied in business logic from a service model.

As easy as that was, you're just scratching the surface of what ColdBox can do for you. Continue reading this book to learn more about:

Environment-specific configuration
Easy SES URL routing
Tons of 3rd party modules
Drop-in security system
Sweet REST web service support

Getting Help

ColdBox is Professional Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license. We'd love to have your help with the product.

Last updated 5 years ago

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