IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways:
- REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0
- REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine Wordpress.
Note that above mentioned problems do not exist in IIS 6.0 FastCGI Extension, which always has been setting the REQUEST_URI server variable correctly.
The update is available for download from the following locations:
Warning: if your PHP application was coded in a way so that it relied on the REQUEST_URI server variable to contain the requested URL without a query string or to contain the final rewritten URL, then installing this update may break your application. Before applying the update, please make sure that your application does not rely on incorrect behavior of FastCGI module.
Acknowledgements: I want to thank IIS team members (Anil Ruia, Won Yoo, Yamini Jagadeesan) for providing this update and Zend Technologies team (Stanislav Malyshev) for validating the changes in FastCGI module.
ruslany on August 26th 2008 in FastCGI, PHP
1,631 views
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
1,084 views
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
736 views
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
791 views
There have been a few questions on IIS.NET PHP forum regarding enabling per-site PHP configuration. This is a common requirement when running PHP applications in shared hosting environment, because each PHP application may require a different set of PHP settings. Shared hosting providers often want to provide their customers with an option of controlling PHP configuration if necessary.
Until recently, it was thought that per-site PHP configuration was only possible when running PHP on Apache in *nix based OS. However, with FastCGI module it is possible to enable this for PHP applications hosted on IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0.
The development team at GoDaddy.com has researched and validated several options for enabling per-site PHP configuration on Windows. Based on their findings, we have updated the PHP shared hosting guide with instructions on how to allow per-site php.ini files when running PHP via FastCGI on IIS 7.0. In this post I will explain how to accomplish the same on IIS 6.0 by using FastCGI extension.
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ruslany on July 12th 2008 in FastCGI, PHP
1,149 views
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
