Creating a root folder for the application

After signing up with a web hosting company or setting up the server software yourself, create a root folder for your web application on the computer running the web server.

Make sure the folder is published by the web server--in other words, the web server can serve any file in this folder or in any of its subfolders in response to an HTTP request from a web browser. For example, on a computer running ColdFusion MX 7, any file in the \CFusionMX7\wwwroot folder or any of its subfolders can be served to a web browser.

The following are the default root folders of selected web servers:

Web server	Default root folder
ColdFusion MX 7	\CFusionMX7\wwwroot
IIS	\Inetpub\wwwroot
Apache (Windows)	\apache\htdocs
Apache (Macintosh)	Users:MyUserName:Sites
Jakarta Tomcat (Windows)	\jakarta-tomcat-4.x.x\webapps\ROOT\

To test the web server, place a test HTML page in the default root folder and attempt to open it by entering the page's URL in a browser. The URL comprises the domain name, such as www.mysite.com, and the filename of the HTML page, as follows:

www.mysite.com/testpage.htm

If the web server is running on your local computer, you can use localhost instead of a domain name. Using the previous example, enter the following localhost URL depending on your web server:

Web server	Localhost URL
ColdFusion MX 7	http://localhost:8500/testpage.htm
IIS	http://localhost/testpage.htm
Apache (Windows)	http://localhost:80/testpage.htm
Apache (Macintosh)	http://localhost/~MyUserName/testpage.htm (where MyUserName is your Macintosh user name)
Jakarta Tomcat (Windows)	http://localhost:8080/testpage.htm

NOTE

By default the ColdFusion MX 7 web server runs on port 8500 and the Jakarta Tomcat web server runs on port 8080.

If the page doesn't open as expected, check for the following errors:

The web server is not started. Consult the web server's documentation for starting instructions.
The file does not have an .htm or .html extension.
You entered the page's file path (for example, c:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\testpage.htm), not its URL (for example, http://localhost:8500/testpage.htm), in the browser's Address text box.
The URL contains a typing mistake. Check for errors and make sure the filename is not followed by a slash, such as http://localhost:8080/testpage.htm/.

After creating a root folder for your application, define a Dreamweaver site to manage your files. See Defining a Dreamweaver site.