Difference between the web and the server admin

April 30, 2012 · By Christian Ready · 4 Comments

This is a feature in Railo that confuses new Railo users very often. Railo comes with two types of administrators. In fact there are two type of administrators for every website you host on a system. In Railo all the settings you make in the Railo Web Administrator affect only the website you are calling it from. So if you for instance call http://www.example.com/railo-context/admin/web.cfm you will only change the settings for www.example.com. This means that all the settings are inside a sandbox if you use the web administrator only.

If, on the other hand, you want to change settings for all websites that are running on the same instance of Railo, you need to use the Server Administrator since it allows you to set global datasources or global mappings that are affecting all the websites in that context.

So whilst your local settings are preserved and safe for your local website, you can still define global resources available to all of them.

Please remember that the settings in each context can be completely different and individual from context to context. This gives you a great flexibility and freedom.

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Tags: Configuration · HowTo · Tips · Websites

4 responses so far ↓

1 David Long // Apr 30, 2012 at 3:37 PM

I think the primary reason that this is confusing to some developers, is that they are thinking of Railo as something that just takes features from ACF, and doesn't add in any of it's own, when, in fact, Railo adds tons of cool features, this being one of them if you use a shared hosting environment.
2 Viktor Krasynskyy // May 1, 2012 at 1:34 AM

From other hand for single-application environment (like ours) it creates extra confusion for administrator. It would be nice if it can be disabled during installation. It would also solve security issues with potential access into Web-administrator from an outside world.
3 David Sedeño // May 2, 2012 at 12:01 PM

I get confused when accessing to http://mywebsite.com and http://<ipserver>; directly.

It may be the same website admin but it's different!

This could be problematic in complex configuration like 2 servers serving the same website. How can access the specific web site admin when the host are the same ?
4 Mark Drew // May 30, 2012 at 4:07 PM

@Viktor: If you just have one website, why don't you just use the web administrator? Your confusion will easily be solved.

You can block of the admin using IIS / Apache rules and both the server and web would both be blocked.

Coming up with a different solution would, in my opinion, create MORE confusion, rather than less.

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