Having confirmed your RedHat system meets the necessary requirements for ColdFusion Express, and having downloaded the setup file, it is time to proceed with the actual installation. Assuming you saved the file with the same name as on Allaire's download server, once you have changed to that directory you can issue this one command at the shell prompt:

gunzip -c < coldfusion-451-linux-express-us.tar.gz | tar xvf -

The -c argument to gunzip is optional and saves a copy of the original tar.gz file which can be handy. You could save further typing by using a wildcard if the source file is the only tar.gz in the directory that begins with “cold”, as follows:

gunzip < cold*.tar.gz | tar xvf -

Either way, a subdirectory called coldfusion-451express-linux-ent.   is created. Assuming its the only subdirectory that starts with "cold" you can change into it and begin the install with another one-liner:

Or forego the semi-colon and issue the commands one at a time. The ColdFusion Express installation script will launch and begin by asking you the directory to which to install. The default entries throughout the entire installation routine will appear within brackets followed by a colon, in this case [/opt]:

To accept the default /opt directory hit enter. Or if you need to install somewhere else due to storage considerations enter the full path to the target directory, then hit enter.

And so forth. The next prompt is for the type of web server you are running, and the authors of the install script wisely provided [apache]: as the default, considering it is required per the README.

Presuming Apache was installed in either its default location or in someplace else easy for the script to find it, the installation will auto-detect your version of Apache, and then prompt you as to whether you want the script to auto-configure Apache while it's at it. I made the mistake of answering y(es) once, but have now learned to just say (n)o. Reconfiguring correctly should you choose yes will be covered below when discussing manual configuration.

Next you will be asked to enter the document root directory for Apache so ColdFusion "Administrator" and documentation pages can be installed. On my system this was /var/www/html. If you are not certain it can be determined from the Apache configuration file, which on my system is at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Within this file, which you will need to get used to working with anyway, find the setting for DocumentRoot. That value is what you need to enter at this prompt.

The two next prompts will be whether to:

install the ColdFusion documentation, and/or
install the ColdFusion sample application
I accept the defaults, yes and no respectively. The sample application in particular seems pointless because it relies on a FoxPro database for which there is no other use.

Finally you are prompted to enter a password for the ColdFusion administrator, which is straightforward enough, followed by which user account ColdFusion should run as. The default is "nobody", and this is the same user that Apache often runs under on various Linux/Unix installs, so it seems reasonable to accept this.