ColdFusion CAR Archive Build Failures: The cfusion/packages Directory Bug and Its Fix

If your ColdFusion Archive (CAR) build terminates with an error instead of producing a .car file, you have almost certainly hit a documented Adobe bug: the CAR build process fails if the cfusion/packages directory does not exist. The CAR file must be written specifically into that folder — and rather than creating the missing directory automatically (which is the expected behavior), the build simply terminates with an error. Adobe lists this as a known issue in the tech notes for ColdFusion 2021 Update 20 and 21, ColdFusion 2023 Update 15, and ColdFusion 2025 Update 3, and publishes an explicit workaround: create a folder named packages inside /cfusion/ if it isn't already there, then re-run the build. That's the entire fix — one directory. This guide covers how to confirm you've hit this specific bug, how to apply and automate the fix (including in containers and CI/CD), how to verify the archive actually built correctly, and the related CAR change in ColdFusion 2025 Update 5 that can cause a different failure you shouldn't confuse with this one.
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