Externalizing ColdFusion Config for Docker: A Practical 12-Factor App Implementation

The 12-factor app methodology’s Factor III says to store config in environment variables, keeping everything that varies between deploys — database credentials, hostnames, API keys — out of your code. For ColdFusion in Docker, you implement this with two complementary mechanisms: the official Adobe ColdFusion image’s built-in environment variables (acceptEULA, password, configureExternalSessions, and others) and CFConfig, the CommandBox module that maps any ColdFusion Administrator setting to a cfconfig_-prefixed environment variable. With CFConfig, cfconfig_adminPassword, cfconfig_datasources.myDSN.password, and similar variables let you configure a containerized ColdFusion server entirely from the environment — no settings baked into the image, no secrets in version control, the same image promotable from dev to production unchanged.
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