Enabling Railo errors on IIS7

I just did a Railo/Tomcat install on an IIS7 server and thought the whole thing was hosed as I could only get a 500 internal server error. As I was using the viviotech installer I even bugged Jordan Michaels ( great name dude :-) ) for some help.

I didn't imagine for a second it could be my test.cfm file as it only said "hello world", man do I feel silly now.

It turns out that everything was working just fine, but IIS7 was actually hiding the Railo errors. Here is what happened.

What I had done on the default website was create a new text file, then rename it to test.cfm. Now by default windows hides known file extensions, so what I really did was rename it to test.cfm.txt but as I couldn't see the .txt I didn't realise.

As a result Railo was throwing file not found errors, IIS was hiding it and giving me a "500 internal server error".

On my 2nd site I had a working test.cfm file, but there was also an application.cfm which was trying to access a non existent DSN, which was also causing an error, which was also hidden.

The setting in IIIS that causes this can be changed as follows. Click images for bigger versions.

Open your IIS management console, select the ROOT to change this for all sites, or the site you want to change, and double click "Error Pages".

Now click on "Edit Feature Settings"

In the following dialog box change it to "detailed errors". The default setting only shows the errors locally on the server.

Thanks to Jordan Michaels for trying to help me resolve a non existent problem with his installer.

Although I did discover a problem with the FusionReactor instll at the same time :-)