I’ve been reading Matt Woodward’s entry Setting Up a Mac for ColdFusion Development and I’ve noticed he’s missed one minor, but kind of important thing – in order for ColdFusion to be able to connect to datasources that use the downloaded drivers, you actually need them findable in the ColdFusion classpath. So, Matt’s recommendation that you place your drivers somewhere convenient isn’t quite right.
My personal preference is to put them in the {cf_installation}/servers/lib directory, making them available to all your ColdFusion server instances (you are using server instance separation for all your different projects, right?). However, in my setup this appears not to work, so I have to put the drivers directly in {cf_installation}/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/cfusion-war/WEB-INF/lib for the cfusion server, which kind of sucks in terms of flexibility.
Truth be told, I actually prefer Matt’s idea – put the drivers somewhere you’ll remember them and separate from your ColdFusion install. What this does, of course, is let you mess as little as possible with the standard ColdFusion install. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way of doing this in the Multiserver install of ColdFusion that I use and recommend in The ACME Guide. Maybe the option to add more directories to the classpath can be an option in Scorpio (Hmmm? Scorpio team?)…
Now, the are several options for placement of these files. The official documentation for this is here, there are several Technotes (the MySQL one here) and Christian Cantrell discusses managing the classpath in a fairly old blog post here.
