About four years ago, shortly before being swallowed by Marcromedia, Allaire introduced a less powerful but FREE version of their popular web development engine, ColdFusion “Express”. Though officially nowhere to be found any longer on Macromedia's site, both Linux and Windows versions can be still be downloaded from a vestigial Allaire download site:

ColdFusion Express for Linux
ColdFusion Express for Windows

One shortcoming in particular is ColdFusion Express' lack of support for working directly with system files; there is no <CFFILE> tag, for those of you already in the know about ColdFusion. Nevertheless, ColdFusion Express for Linux provides a viable web development environment, particularly considering considering it's out-of-the-box support for both the MySQL and Postgres database engines.

ColdFusion's Linux install is text-based and can therefore be performed from a console window. This is convenient for instance if you want to install it onto a dedicated or virtual private server account from the shell. The installation routine should prove fairly straightforward, however, even for those who are used to operating from their graphical desktop environment.

As with installing any substantial software package, there are certain minimum system requirements. First and foremost, you must be able to install ColdFusion Express as the Linux 'root' user. Therefore to install the software remotely over the Internet, you would most likely need a dedicated or virtual private server account, with full root priveleges, as opposed to a “shared” hosting account.

Other requirements as summarized from both the README file, and my own experience are:

This is perhaps the turning point for those readers more comfortable working from a graphical desktop. You would either need to consult your system administrator, or if that is you, issue a number of Linux commands from the shell prompt. My experience has been with Apache 1.3.27 under RedHat 7.1; your mileage may vary. In particular take note that you will also need to enter the path to your web server document root during the actual installation process.

Having determined that your system meets the requirements, follow the download link above from your browser, be it graphical like Mozilla or Netscape, or text-based such as Lynx: it's about 14 MB and therefore could take the better part of an hour over a dialup connection. When the download is complete, from your console cd to the directory to which you saved the ColdFusion Express installation file.