Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

FarCry was talked about quite a bit (well, at least more than I expected) at CFUNITED.  One thing that a lot of people had trouble with is installing it on their system.  Jeff Coughlin has posted some video tutorials on his site, but if you are like me, for tutorials like this, you prefer to be able to print the steps and follow them line by line.  That’s what this entry is all about.

 

This tutorial is for IIS ONLY.  As I get experience with other types of web servers, I will post tutorials for those as well.

1. Extract the files to whatever directory you choose.  For this example, I will use C:\FarCry.  When you are done extracting the files, you should have 3 directories under C:\FarCry.

2. Create a new blank database.  MySQL 4.x users must have Create_tmp_table_priv set to yes in order the successfully set-up FarCry. We will call it farcry_demo. Pretend we are using SQL Server for this tutorial.

3. Create a new ColdFusion datasource that point to the database you just created. We will call this farcry_demo, as well.

This is where a lot of people seem to have trouble.  I have followed the instructions, and it is a bit confusing…hopefully, I can make this more clearer.  In the instructions they discuss setting up FarCry as the home directory of your web server, or to set it up to run ‘alongside your existing applications’.  The rest of this tutorial will follow the latter, for two reasons.

1.      It is easier to follow.
2.      Even if you want to change the server to have FarCry be the ‘home directory’, you can easily change it at the end.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

4. Create a new site in IIS. Let’s call this…hmmm….farcry_demo You can’t set this site’s home directory since the directory is not created.

5. Create a new virtual directory under this new site for the administration module, we will call this one FarCry. For the record, you can name this anything you want as you can specify its name during the install.  This directory must point to the …farcry_core\admin directory, in our example, it would be…C:\FarCry\farcry_core\Admin.

6. Make sure that DNS is setup for the site you created in step 4, or that you can access the site by using an IP address.

7. Browse to http://domain name or IP address/farcry/install from the server where the site is installed. The ‘farcry’ in this example is the name of the virtual directory specified in step 5.

8. On the form enter the following information: Our values are in ( )

1. The name of your FarCry site, this can be different than the site name in IIS. (farcry_demo)
   
2. The ColdFusion datasource to be used. (farcry_demo)
   
3. The database type. (SQL Server)
   
4. DB owner. - If using SQL Server, this should be dbo. (dbo.)
   
5. Application Mapping.  If the FarCry site will be the main site, the value of this field should be / .If you are setting up a FarCry site as a subdirectory of you site, then the path to the farcry site directory should be entered here. (/)
   
6. The farCry Admin Mapping is the name of the virtual directory specified in step 5.  This may seem redundant, but this form is used to created more than one FarCry site on a server. (farcry)
   

9. Click ‘Install’

Once the install scripts have finished running, you need to update the IIS site to point to the newly created directory.  Go to the site set-up in step 4.  Set the home directory to C:\FarCry\site name\www\ where site name is the value you specified in the first form field of step 8.

You should now be able to view the site by going to http://domain name or IP. Or the admin by going to http://domain name or IP/farcry, where farcry is the name of the admin mapping.

If you have trouble following this tutorial, please let me know.