Tonight as I’m setting up a new server I wanted to make sure I had URL rewrite ability. Normally this is no issue as I use Apache for most anything web server related. However this time I am setting up a Mura site on Railo running on Tomcat. And yes, I’m using Tomcat for both my Java Servlet engine and my web server. As such I wanted to ensure I have “pretty URLs” for my Mura-based application. In this post I will attempt to show you how to set that up.

At this point I am going to assume you have a running Tomcat and Mura application. The first thing we need to do is download Paul Tuckey’s excellent UrlRewriteFilter Java filter. This can be located at http://www.tuckey.org/urlrewrite/. The version I downloaded as of this writing is 3.2.0. Once downloaded you can extract the contents anywhere you wish to keep it. You will notice there isn’t much there… in fact at the top level there is only a folder named WEB-INF. Opening that folder doesn’t reveal much more.

If you have Tomcat running you’ll need to stop it temporarily for this next part. After stopping Tomcat, copy the file /WEB-INF/lib/urlrewrite-3.2.0.jar into your lib folder, found at {TOMCAT}/lib, where {TOMCAT} is the folder where you have placed your Tomcat installation. By copying this JAR file there you are making the URL re-writer filter available to all Java applications running in your Tomcat instance.

The next phase is to setup Railo (yes, you can do this in Adobe CF as well) to use this Java re-writer filter. Where you do this varies based on how you have setup your Railo application, but I have my Railo files extracted in my Mura application’s web root directory. So in my main Mura directory I have a WEB-INF folder containing the entire Railo library.

If you open up that WEB-INF folder there should be a web.xml file. Open this file in your favorite text editor. Near the top, after the **** node and before the **** nodes paste the following XML.

<!-- URL Rewrite Filter -->
<filter>
	<filter-name>UrlRewriteFilter</filter-name>
	<filter-class>org.tuckey.web.filters.urlrewrite.UrlRewriteFilter</filter-class>
	<init-param>
		<param-name>logLevel</param-name>
		<param-value>WARN</param-value>
	</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
	<filter-name>UrlRewriteFilter</filter-name>
	<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>

This block of XML tells Tomcat, when loading your application, to install this URL re-write filter, and to map any requests that come through the CFMLServlet to it. Basically that means that any CFM or CFC requests will go through the filter.

The next part of this same file that must be altered is the servlet mappings to allow paths after “index.cfm”. This allows Mura to execute requests like “/index.cfm/contact-us/”. To do this find the following block of XML:

<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>*.cfm</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Once you find this, you want to insert this next block of XML right after it.

<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>CFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>/index.cfm/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Now we are ready to configure the re-writer filter to forward our “pretty” SES URLs to index.cfm! In the extracted files there is a file named urlrewrite.xml. Copy this file into the same folder as your Railo web.xml file that we just got done modifying. Now open it up. Fortunately this file is pretty well documented, and the online docs have even more information! For the moment, though, we just want to make sure that all of our SES URLs go to the right place. The other concern here is to also ensure that when we go to Mura’s administrator, the URLs DO NOT get forwarded to index.cfm. So, with a little bit of regular expression magic, we can make UrlRewriteFilter do this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.2//EN" "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.2.dtd">

<!--
	Configuration file for UrlRewriteFilter
	http://tuckey.org/urlrewrite/
-->
<urlrewrite>
	<rule>
		<note>Makes all requests forward to /index.cfm/whatever-came-next
		Ignores admin URLs so the admin still works correctly for Mura.</note>
		<from>^/(?!admin|plugins|js|css|assets|images|tasks|railo-context|flex2gateway|wysiwyg)(.*)$</from>
		<to>/index.cfm/$1</to>
	</rule>
</urlrewrite>

Ok, super. The final phase is to tell Mura that we wish to make our URL’s pretty! To do this, start Tomcat back up, then log into your Mura administrator and browse to File Manager -> Application Root and click on the folder config. In this folder there is a file named settings.ini.cfm. Click on the pencil icon to the right of the file name to edit it. Once inside we are looking for two settings: siteidinurls and indexfileinurls. These settings should both be set to zero (0). Once you save those changes make sure to click on Reload Application.

And with that you should be able to browse to your Mura site without the crazy question marks or index.cfm in the URL. But if you are in the administrator you should still have all the question marks so it behaves as expected.

I hope this helped somebody out there. Cheers, and happy coding!