Question

I downloaded Coldfusion 10, opened the ColdFusion administrator, followed these steps, and all I ended up with The idea is a 250 MB .war file that has nothing to do with the .zip files I am trying to convert. I’m clearly missing the pointcompile then package. Can someone help?

1. Open the ColdFusion Administrator.
2. Specify a unique name for the archive file (no extension) in the Archive Name field.
3. Click Add. The Add New Archive screen appears.
4. Specify archive settings on the Add New Archive screen.
5. Click Create. ColdFusion creates an EAR or WAR file in the specified application distribution directory.

Answer 1

A .war file is just a .zip file with a different extension that contains the needed files to run in a servlet container or application server. If your zip file already contains all of those files (WEB-INF, etc) then you need only rename the file from .zip to .war.

If your zip file is just a zip of your CF files from a site and you are trying to redeploy it as a .war then, after creating the .war file you would need to unpack it, copy the files into the appropriate place, and create a new .war.

You really don’t provide much to go on, so I cannot offer much more.

UPDATE:
I will add, that the easiest way to deploy a new CF .war would be to deploy the .war that the CF installer created on a servlet container (Tomcat, for example). The servlet container should unpack it and deploy it. Once you have confirmed that CF is running, you can then copy your CF files (not in a .zip file) to the folder that was created for that app (by default it is usually called /cfusion).