I find it frustrating that we can’t do that, and honestly, I’m frustrated that we have to refresh at all. I’d love to find out the technical limitations that require it.

A .cfm does not to be called because the restInitApplication() code sits in the Application.cfc’s onRequestStart() method. And even if you app is api-only , it still would have a Application.cfc in any case. So, if your app sits in a folder called “myapp”, you would then call http://localhost/myapp?refreshRESTServices=true to refresh your services and once that’s done, you can then call the actual service via http://localhost/rest/{MyMappingName}/{MyServiceRestpath}

That’s what I did and it worked for me. But yes, doing it from the administrator works too. I didn’t want to switch to and fro between browser windows to keep refreshing my services. But both ways it works.

The ONLY way that I see this as possible is if you have non-REST code, eg an index.cfm somewhere, and you call THAT and reinitialize the rest application. That does not suit my purposes, my application is api-only.

It would seem, then, that I have no choice but to use the refreshing tool within the CF Administrator. I could create an index.cfm that does the refresh and use that instead, but they are functionally equivalent so why waste my time?

restInitApplication(getDirectoryFromPath(getCurrentTemplatePath()), this.name);

I am using the current directory as the root folder (first argument), which is where CF will search for any REST enabled services. and the second argument can be any name you want. I just chose to use this.name.