My experience trying to setup CFwheels 3

[mikegrogan]

Hi All. Long time wheels user. Thank you to the small team that works on this and keeps it going.

We currently have multiple wheels application running as sub folders under the root of our website. All on 2.5. I want to start upgrading them to 3. We use Commandbox locally, and Adobe Coldfusion 2023 on the servers under IIS. We have a decent commandbox setup at this point, but I can't say I'm a Forgebox or package expert.

Since 3 seems like a big update I first just wanted to install a brand new instance to test and see what it looks like. Figured I'd try to do everything through commandbox and the wheels cli. I updated all my installed packages under commandbox to start it off, and thought it looked good.

I was having a lot of problems with wheels new. I quickly realized that the naming changed for the wheels cli. I had to install wheels-cli and unintall cfwheels-cli. After that things went smoothly for the initial creation. I chose ACF 2023 as that is what we currently use.

The info page doesn't seem to convey that it's wheels 3.0.0.+46) the latest one

Project: Wheels Base Template
Project Version: 3.0.0+46
Wheels Version: 3.0.0+46
CFML Engine: Lucee 5.4.8.2

Dependencies

wheels-core @ 3.0.0+46 - Installed: Yes
wirebox @ ^7 - Installed: Yes
testbox @ ^6 - Installed: Yes

Once it was created I tried a server start, but it threw an error regarding the JVM point release number or something. I just took my current server.json settings and updated the javaversion to 17 and that fixed that. Then I ran into another issue that I had fixed before as well regarding bytecode. Frustrating Adobe coldfusion makes us enter these arguments still. There's probably a better workaround, but can't remember.

"jvm":{
"minHeapSize":"1024",
"heapSize":"4096",
"javaVersion":"openjdk17",
"args":[
"-Dcoldfusion.compiler.block.bytecode=false"
]
}

I tried a server start again, but it needed me to cfpm install image, mail, caching, etc. So I did that and then finally got it loaded up!

I clicked through the wheels top navigation (e.g. Info, Routes, API, etc). API and Guides are throwing errors. The rest seem to work.

API and Guides error

Could not find the ColdFusion component or interface tests.Test.
Ensure that the name is correct and that the component or interface exists.

This is under /vendor/wheels/public/docs/core.cfm: line 64

I also see this error

Routines cannot be declared more than once.
The routine $populateDocFunctionMeta has been declared twice in different templates.
 
ColdFusion cannot determine the line of the template that caused this error. This is often caused by an error in the exception handling subsystem.

If I go into vendor\wheels\public\docs\core.cfm and comment out line 64 and do a reload=true I can get the API page to load up.

ArrayAppend(documentScope, {"name" = "test", "scope" = CreateObject("component", "tests.Test")});

If I click on the API page again I then get this error again

Routines cannot be declared more than once.
The routine $populateDocFunctionMeta has been declared twice in different templates.
 
ColdFusion cannot determine the line of the template that caused this error. This is often caused by an error in the exception handling subsystem.

Doing another reload=true and I go back to the "Could not find the ColdFusion component or interface tests.Test." error. This is mostly because I removed my original comment on line 64.

Kind of a loop though. I can only load up the http://localhost/wheels/api page if I comment out "ArrayAppend(documentScope, {"name" = "test", "scope" = CreateObject("component", "tests.Test")});" under core.cfm and call the api page with reload=true every single time.

For the guides page too it's sort of the same thing. I comment out the tests.test and call it with reload=true. From the screenshot below if I select the home guide it errors again, since it's not called with reload=true

I'm sure there's something obvious I might be missing. It just doesn't seem like something is running initially correctly, or I need to tweak something, but not sure what it is at this point.

Wheels cli

Separately I'm trying to learn the wheels cli commands. While many commands seem to work, the wheels server commands don't. I'm on commandbox 6.3.2+00857.

[zainforbjs]

@mikegrogan Thanks for the detailed error message!
I tested the scenario described here locally and wasn’t able to reproduce the issues with the API or the guides. Everything worked as expected on my end.

However, I did encounter the error when using the Wheels CLI. That issue has been fixed in the latest version of the CLI.

Please uninstall the previous version of wheels-cli and install the latest version again(which will now be 3.0.0+47). After updating, the problem should be resolved.

[mikegrogan]

Hi @zainforbjs thanks for the reply. I updated and wheels server commands are working now! Thanks for that.

In reviewing so far wheels server start adds this to my server.json file at the end, which doesn't seem to be correct.

"openbrowser=true":true,
"host=127.0.0.1":true

I already have these in my server.json as well.
"openBrowser":true,
"web":{
"host":"localhost",
..
}

API and Guides error

I changed my coldfusion server from ACF 2023 to ACF 2025 and still get the same error when trying to load this part of the wheels internal site.

To be complete I just tried with the latest version of Lucee and it worked! I think you have an adobe coldfusion bug. Maybe test on that to re-create the issue. Assuming you ran on Lucee. I'd love to help (time permitting), but not sure I completely understand the issue yet.