If you find this post in 2023 or beyond and are looking for the CF2021 installers, please read this update before proceeding. I started to get a lot of comments once CF2023 came out. This post is from Oct 2022, about new installers offered at that time, while CF2021 was still the latest version.

To be clear, once Adobe comes out with a new version, they REMOVE the installers of the old version from the public pages of their site. Does that mean you're stuck and CANNOT get the installers, perhaps that "you paid for"? No, it does NOT mean that. You just need to know where to find them.

1) First, if you are the person who BOUGHT CF, then you should have an account at either https://account.adobe.com/products or https://licensing.adobe.com/, and you can find the installers you paid for there.

2) If instead you either DID NOT buy CF (perhaps using the free trial edition), or someone ELSE bought it (maybe you don't know who it is), or you just can't get into that account, note that there is an online repository of old (and new) installers at cfmlrepo.com, which is managed by trusted community members, including myself.

Now, back to what the original post was about...

Here's some surprising news: Adobe has released a "refreshed" installer for CF2021, which includes update 5 (which came out last week) built-in.

Read on for (much) more.

Did you know about this? You'd be forgiven if you had not heard, for reasons I will explain. And I'm glad to share the news, though it's a good news/bad news sort of thing (just like with the update itself. More on that in another post to come.)

TLDR: these new "refreshed" CF2021 installers are (for now) available only here.

As for information ABOUT the refreshed installers, here's the news in brief (the good and the not so good):

• Good news: there is a new full installer for CF2021, for each of Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Solaris.
• Not good news: there are not new "zip" installers, at least for now.
• Good news: these "refreshed" installers includes update 5, so if you are installing CF2021 newly on a machine, that would be easier than getting an older installer and updating it.
• Not good news: the installer implements only Java 11.0.11, while the version available as of the release of update 5 last week was 11.0.16.1, from July 2022
• Some odd news: Adobe didn't mention the availability of this refreshed installer in the CF2021 update 5 technote, nor their blog post or forum post announcing update 5.
• The most odd news: again, the refreshed installers are only available for download from one place currently, the CF "downloads" page. More on that below.
• Bad news for those still using CF2018: while there was indeed the update 15 released also last week, Adobe has NOT offered such a refreshed installer for CF2018 and likely will not.

And for any seeing this who may wonder, while Adobe offers "updates" for CF 2-3 times a year (for each of the two current versions they support, currently CF2021 and CF2018), they build a new "installer" far less frequently. Of course there's the original one (which was in Nov 2020 for CF2021), and then sometimes they may "refresh" the installers, which they last did for CF2021 in Sept 2021. That includes update 2 (also released that day) as well as Java 11.0.11. (FWIW, the original installer from 2020 included of course NO updates and strangely includes Java 11.0.1, which was already very old then.)

Where you can find the refreshed installers, for now

As I noted above in the TLDR above, the refreshed installers are available for now in only one place, in the "Adobe ColdFusion (2021 release) Product Downloads" section of the "ColdFusion downloads" page.

That's not normally where we would expect to find them. In fact, I don't know that I'd ever seen them offered on that page before. It usually POINTS people to the first of the more common places people might expect to find CF installers, as I discuss in the next section.

Where you will NOT find the refreshed installers, for now

So as I noted above, you'd be forgiven for not KNOWING there were refreshed installers, but you'd also be forgiven for not FINDING them, even if you were to go looking for them.

They are NOT (for now) listed in the typical places one might look:

• They are NOT offered by your filling in the form where one can get the ColdFusion Trial or Developer edition. This page is pointed to from the top right of the Adobe ColdFusion product page, and it's also pointed to from that "downloads" page discussed above. Instead, filling out that form (today, Oct 17) will offer you instead the installer that was "refreshed" in Sept 2021, which included update 2 that was released at that time (and the installer included Java 11.0.11 also).
• The are also NOT offered if you instead look BELOW that form on that aforementioned page. If you may not have noticed, those links HAVE been there for over a year--but they tragically have been pointing to the ORIGINAL installer (the one with NO updates, from Nov 2020, which also came with the very dated Java 11.0.1). I'd complained of this to Adobe previously.
• Finally, beware that may NOT currently be available on the downloads page once you log into the Adobe Licensing Website (LWS). I don't have a login to confirm that, but since they were not placed behind the login form above, I suspect it's not yet been put on the downloads page of the LWS.

I asked Adobe about this, this past weekend, and they say they ARE planning to ensure the refreshed installer is put in all 3 places. Apparently it's easiest for them to modify that first "ColdFusion downloads" where it's offered for now, and getting the other pages changed take more coordination with Adobe folks outside the CF team.

I will update this page as I learn that either of these pages above are corrected to include the new "refreshed" installer. But I thought this information was important enough to get this information out ASAP.

How can you know which version your installer is?

Update: After offering this post, it struck me that someone might reasonably ask how they could know which installer they have. As you may have noticed, Adobe doesn't change the name of their installers when they're "refreshed". And they don't offer md5 hashes for them. And the ui of the installers doesn't change in any way between "refreshes".

While I could find and report the exact file sizes for each of the 4 os installers, for this and the previous and the original installers, I don't have ready access to that info for all 12 file variants. (Also, I seem to recall that the size of even a given file can report differently on different OSs and file systems, but I may have that wrong.)

Briefly, though, let me note that both the windows exe and the macos dmg files are in fact simply compressed folders (that each os knows how to "execute"). As such, if you view them with a tool that can explore (or extract) such a compressed file, you can see in some of the subfolders that there are files with date modified values, which will either be from Oct 2022 for this "refreshed" installer, or from Sept 2021 for the previous one, or Nov 2021 if it's the original installer.

(FWIW, on Windows I favor using the free 7-zip tool for this, as it has a nice Explorer integration, where you can right click on a file and it will offer an "open archive" option if it detects the file to be compressed. No need to extract the file.)

The below is the rest of what I'd written in this post originally.

Finally, a concern related to results of Update 5 as compared to these "refreshed installers"

Finally, I want to share a concern related to the results of Update 5 as compared to these "refreshed installers". It's not that the installer has a "problem", but rather that I did a comparison between a) the files in the ColdFusion2021 directory as put in place by that refreshed installer and b) the files in the ColdFusion2021 directory as exist based on the previous installer having been updated to update 5. Sadly, some of the files put in place per the refreshed installer are newer (in date and content) than those put in place per the update alone (into an existing CF2021 installation).

As just one example, consider the jquery.js file, at \ColdFusion2021\cfusion\wwwroot\cf_scripts\scripts\ajax\jquery\. With the refreshed installer, the version indicated in that file is 3.6, while in that file after applying update 5 to an existing CF2021 install, the version in that file is 3.1! (And I found this to be so on two different machines.)

And to be clear, this seems more a problem with the UPDATE rather than with the refreshed installer. I am fearful that having a difference like this could lead to confusion, where people may think the results should be the "same". It would seem some aspects of improvements in the refreshed installer are NOT accruing to those who instead merely apply the update to their current installation of CF.

This matter is really worthy of its own post., which I plan to do, with much more detail. I'll detail all the key differences like this, and then I'll file a bug report and share a link to that in the post.

Conclusion

For now, though, if you're installing CF2021, it would seem most would want to use these refreshed installers, which already have Update 5.

And for now you can only get that refreshed installer at the ColdFusion Downloads page. Again, I'll change this post as the situation evolves.

Oh, and I suspect some of my readers are wondering, "where's your blog post about the update itself", and the good news/bad news about IT which I alluded to in the open (as well as in a tweet last week). It's just taking me a long time to get that done. Stuff like the above only slows down that process. But this seemed the more important news to share first.

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