Installation

Instructions for installing Wheels on your system.

Installing Wheels is so simple that there is barely a need for a chapter devoted to it. But we figured we'd better make one anyway in case anyone is specifically looking for a chapter about installation.

So, here are the simple steps you need to follow to get rolling on Wheels...

1. Download Wheels

You have 2 choices when downloading Wheels. You can either use the latest official release of Wheels, or you can take a walk on the wild side and go with the latest committed source code in our Subversion (SVN) repository.

The latest official release can be found in the downloads section of this website, and the SVN trunk is available at our Google Code site.

In most cases, we recommend going with the official release because it's well documented and has been through a lot of bug testing. Only if you're in desperate need of a feature that has not been released yet would we advise you to go with the version stored in the SVN trunk.

Let's assume you have downloaded the latest official release. (Really, you should go with this option.) You now have a .zip file saved somewhere on your computer. On to the next step...

2. Setup the Website

Getting an empty website running with Wheels installed is an easy process if you already know your way around IIS or Apache. Basically, you need to create a new website in your web server of choice and unzip the contents of the file into the root of it.

In case your not sure, here are the instructions for setting up an empty Wheels site that can be accessed when typing localhost in your browser. The instructions refer to a system running Windows Server 2003 and IIS, but you should be able to follow along and apply the instructions with minor modifications to your system. (See Requirements for a list of tested systems).

• Create a new folder under your web root (usually C:\Inetpub\wwwroot) named wheels_site and unzip the Wheels .zip file into the root of it.
• Create a new website using IIS called Wheels Site with localhost as the host header name and C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\mysite as the path to your home directory.

If you want to run a Wheels powered application from a sub folder in an existing website, this is entirely possible, but you'll have to live with the fact that you can never turn on URL rewriting and get those pretty URLs (read more about this in the URL Rewriting chapter).

3. Setup the Database

Setting up the database is actually a completely optional step. You can run a Wheels site without ever involving a database. But because it's highly unlikely you would do that, we're including the instructions in this chapter.

Create a new database in SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL and add a new data source for it in the ColdFusion Administrator, just as you'd normally do. Now open up `config/database.cfm` and set the `application.settings.database.datasource` variable to the name you chose for the data source. This is all that you need to do before Wheels can connect to your database and start working its magic.

4. Test It

When you've configured the web server and database, you can test your installation by typing http://localhost/ (or whatever you set as the host header name) in your web browser. You should get a page saying "Welcome to Wheels!"

That's it. You're done. This is where the fun begins!