On our IIS we have multiple websites that serve shared applications under their respective hostname/bindings...
We achieve this by deploying the applications and then using the "Add Application" so that it can be served as "http://myhost1.com/myAddedApplicationAlias".
This works great, except that when deploying the application to be shared, we have to enter a bogus port number...
How can we avoid this port binding since the added application will be served from an existing web site's hostname/bindings?
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Preface: I'm new to the whole web hosting thing, so I apologize if any information I give doesn't make sense or is inaccurate. I will do my best to explain things.
I currently have a self-hosted server running Windows Server 2019 that is hosting two sites via IIS. I recently have created an application that runs on a Docker container instance that hosts a website on port 40444. I would like to access this site via a specific subdirectory on my website instead of the port (www.mywebsite.com/website3 instead of www.mywebsite.com:40444). For clarification, here is an example of what I'm looking to do:
www.mywebsite.com/website1 (hosted on IIS)
www.mywebsite.com/website2 (hosted on IIS)
www.mywebsite.com/website3 (hosted on docker via port 40444)
I was able to get a basic reverse proxy set up and successfully got the docker application to show on localhost/, but I would prefer using a subdirectory if possible.(image below).
I attempted to change (.*) to (.*)website3$ and it did what I wanted, but the website cannot load any files (i.e css, js, etc.) and gives me the following error
https://www.mywebsite.com/css/style.css net::ERR_ABORTED 404 (Not Found)
If IIS isn't the best option to accomplish what I need I am more than happy to use a different solution. As I mentioned before, I'm new to web hosting and it was just the simplest to set up.
Is there a way to deploy a containerized say .net core web app to IIS on a web server and use things like docker swarm and a virtual load balancer.
Am I looking at this all wrong? Would IIS even factor here?
If you want to go down this path, IIS does run in a (Windows) container, however most web apps I’ve seen uses Kestrel as the application web server (I.e. the default netcore images) and some kind of reverse proxy in front (Nginx, HAproxy) to handle things like load balancing, SSL termination and serving of static content.
I think the use case for IIS (though I haven’t used it so I may be wrong here) is to serve legacy ASP.net applications in a containerized environment.
See:
https://hub.docker.com/r/microsoft/iis/
I have a project that I have developed which is an ASP.NET MVC website.
For a while I have been able to access the website externally but recently when I try to access it at its https domain I get an IIS 7 logo, but http will access the site fine.
However it is a requirement that we use https otherwise I would just stick with http.
There was a dev version of the website that was also able to be accessible both http and https externally and it still works.
(The dev version and the production version used two different subdomains)
I have gone into all settings in the features view under sites in the IIS manager for both the dev version and the production version and made all their settings match and it still won't show externally.
What other areas can I explore?
The OS of the server that the website is server from is Windows Server 2012
Let's say we have 2 separate applications, a Web Api application and a MVC application both written in .NET 4.5. If you were to host the MVC application in IIS under the host header "https://www.mymvcapp.com/" would it be possible to host the Web Api application separately in IIS under the host header "https://www.mymvcapp.com/api/"?
The processes running the 2 applications in IIS need to be separate. I know of the separate methods of hosting, self hosting and hosting using IIS. I would like to use IIS if at all possible.
Also, how would I host two applications (an API and a web application) if each were on a separate server so that I could serve the api from http://www.mymvcapp.com/api?
There are at least 4 ways of doing what you want to do. The first two methods are for if you have 1 web server, and both applications are served from that one web server running IIS. This method also works if you have multiple web servers running behind a load-balancer, so long as the API and the Web site are running on the same server.
The second two methods are using what's called a "Reverse Proxy", essentially a way to route traffic from one server (the proxy server) to multiple internal servers depending on what type of traffic you're receiving. This is for when you run your web servers on a set of servers and run your API on a different set of servers. You can use any reverse proxy software you want, I mention nginx and HAProxy because I've used both in the past.
Single Web Server running IIS
There are two ways to do it in IIS:
If your physical folder structure is as follows:
c:\sites\mymvcapp
c:\sites\mymvcapp\api
You can do the following:
Create a Child Application
Creating a child application will allow your "API" site to be reachable from www.mymvcapp.com/api, without any routing changes needed.
To do that:
Open IIS Manager
Click on the appropriate site in the "Sites" folder tree on the left side
Right Click on the API folder
click "Convert to Application"
The downside is that all Child Applications inherit the web config of their parent, and if you have conflicting settings in there, you'll see some runtime weirdness (if it works at all).
Create a directory Junction
The second way is a way to do it so that the applications maintain their separateness; and again you don't have to do any routing.
Assuming two folder structures:
c:\sites\api
c:\sites\mvcapp
You can set up Junctions in Windows. From the command line*:
cd c:\sites
mklink /D /J mymvcapp c:\sites\mvcapp
cd mymvcapp
mklink /D /J api c:\sites\api
Then go into IIS Manager, and convert both to applications. This way, the API will be available in \api\, but not actually share its web.config settings with the parent.
Multiple Servers
If you use nginx or haproxy as a reverse proxy, you can set it up to route calls to each app depending.
nginx Reverse Proxy settings
In your nginx.conf (best practice is to create a sites-enabled conf that's a symlink to sites-available, and you can destroy that symlink whenever deploying) do the following:
location / {
proxy_pass http://mymvcapp.com:80
}
location /api {
proxy_pass http://mymvcapp.com:81
}
and then you'd set the correct IIS settings to have each site listen on ports 80 (mymvcapp) and ports 81 (api).
HAProxy
acl acl_WEB hdr_beg(host) -i mymvcapp.com
acl acl_API path_beg -i /api
use_backend API if acl_API
use_backend WEB if acl_WEB
backend API
server web mymvcapp.com:81
backend WEB
server web mymvcapp.com:80
*I'm issuing the Junction command from memory; I did this a few months ago, but not recently, so let me know if there are issues with the command
NB: the config files are not meant to be complete config files -- only to show the settings necessary for reverse proxying. Depending on your environment there may be other settings you need to set.
Using the [RequireHttps] port in an ASP.NET MVC application causes a redirect to HTTPS on port 443 if the user attempts to access the application over HTTP.
However, in IIS Express, the application will probably not running on port 443. It will, instead, be running on something like port 44301.
I've found various tips for replacing RequireHttpsAttribute with an implementation that takes the alternative port number as a parameter, or reads it from Web.config.
This is clunky, because it requires configuration in more than one place.
Is there any way to do this -- programmatically -- in a generic fashion?
Without trying to pre-empt the answers, some options occur to me:
Is there any way to discover the bindings being used by the instance of IIS or IIS Express that's hosting my app?
Is there any way to read applicationHost.config for the current IIS / IIS Express host?
You can check currently used bindings (of IIS/IIS Express) by running following command
"netsh http show servicestate view=requestq"
You can find applicationhost.config file of IIS Express in %userprofile%\documents\iisexpress\config folder.