If you ever tried to set up Ruby on Rails (RoR) on IIS 7.0 with FastCGI you have probably noticed that the process is not very straightforward. There are a few workarounds that need to be applied in order for RoR to function correctly. In particular, handling of static files in your web application can be tricky on IIS 7.0. The problem is that RoR uses clean URL’s that look similar to this: http://mysite.com/home/about. In order for RoR to be invoked for this kind of URL’s it is necessary to create a “catch all” handler mapping in IIS (that is a handler mapping with path attribute set to “*“). When you create such a handler mapping it will cause requests for static files to be routed to RoR, which will obviously fail to handle them.
For RoR to work correctly on IIS with FastCGI it needs to behave like a 404 handler, meaning that it should be invoked only if the requested URL does not exist as a file on a physical file system. The default IIS configuration does not allow this kind of configuration, so there are several workarounds available today - this article describes them in great details. However, these workarounds are either not recommended for production usage or are not easy to configure. In this post I will explain how URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 can be used to configure IIS and RoR to work correctly with static files.
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ruslany on August 7th 2008 in FastCGI, URLRewrite
URL rewrite module fully utilizes extensibility of IIS 7.0 configuration system. The rewrite rules are stored in applicationHost.config and web.config files in XML format. This provides a huge benefit of being able to use rich set of IIS 7.0 management tools and API’s for managing and scripting URL rewriter configuration. For example, you can automate any configuration task, including creating, editing and deleting of rewrite rules, by:
The Configuration Editor, included in the Administration Pack for IIS 7.0, greatly simplifies the process of generating scripts for automating URL rewriter configuration. In this post, I will demonstrate how to use the Configuration Editor to automate configuration of rewrite rules.
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ruslany on July 27th 2008 in URLRewrite
IIS.NET team has been very proactive in helping us out with testing of URL rewrite module. In fact, they even agreed to deploy the latest build of the module on the production server that hosts http://www.iis.net. This kind of real-life deployments really helps us validate the features and functionality of the module. And being able to do this validation so early in release cycle gives us a good opportunity to adjust the feature set, re-consider some of the design decisions, or just find some very good bugs.
IIS.NET has URL rewriting requirements, which are typical for large content management systems. The articles on the site are often moved or updated and the old links should continue to work. Or there is a need to have a nice URL (for example - http://www.iis.net/fastcgi) for a page that currently has some meaningless URL (e.g. http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1521). IIS.NET has more than a hundred of such URL mappings. Majority of those mappings are static, so there is no need to use regular expression patterns, capture groups, back-references or any other advanced URL rewriting stuff. Rewriting logic is very simple:- for example if input URL is “/php” then rewrite it to “/default.aspx?tabid=50001″. But if we tried to define this logic by creating a rewrite rule per URL mapping we would end up with more than a hundred of rules, which would be evaluated for every request. That would kill the performance of the web site.
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ruslany on July 18th 2008 in URLRewrite
