Windows 7 / Networking

Work with Websites

After you have learned to work with the many tools in IIS to manage the environment, you will need to learn how a website is stored and how to work with the applications your website may need to support. In this section, you will learn how IIS can provide support for your websites.

Understand the Basics of IIS Websites

Before you can work with applications, you need to understand the basics of how websites are used in IIS. Even though your websites may have a combination of simple static web pages and complex applications, all websites have one thing in common. The files supporting the website are stored on the server. Being able to quickly navigate and work with these files provides you with a quick path to fix, replace, or even troubleshoot your applications.

Typically, before you start to work directly with your websites by looking into the directories, you will have a testing process in place. The testing process is essential so that when you modify the website currently in production, you do not crash the website or cause your users or even customers any issues.

By default, your website files are stored on your system drive under the inetpub\wwwroot directory. When your website programmers want to change the files, they can quickly navigate directly to the directory and work with the files on your websites. You can also view the website contents directly in the IIS Management Console. This is especially useful if the website is on a Windows Server 2012 Server Core installation. To view the content in the IIS Management Console, you need to be in the content view.

Open IIS Management Console by selecting the Server Manager icon from the taskbar and choose IIS Manager from the Tools menu.
In the navigation tree, click the server where the website you want to manage is located.
In the middle pane toward the bottom of the IIS Management Console window, click Content View.
Double-click the site you want to manage, and a screen will appear.
From the Content View window, you can right-click any whitespace in the console and select Explore. This will take you directly to the Windows Explorer view of the directory where you can modify and work with your files.

One of the nice things about being able to work with your websites directly like this is that it does not require a lot of administrative burden when you need to move the application's files and settings. Even if the application is connected to a server, at the end of the day you are just moving files and not changing the configuration of the applications. You will still want to test and verify your applications prior to moving the files, however.

Moving the location of your websites from one physical location to another involves two steps. First, you configure the website's physical directory; and second, you copy/cut and paste the files into the new directory. Moving the physical path for your websites is the same procedure regardless of the application you are moving. You could be moving a .NET application or a PHP application. Keep in mind you are just changing the location of the files, not the configuration. Changing the physical directory is just a matter of modifying a setting inside the IIS Management Console:

Open Server Manager by selecting the icon from the taskbar, and then choose IIS Manager from the Tools menu.
In the navigation tree, click the server where the website you want to manage is located.
Double-click Sites in the middle Details pane, and click the site you want to change.
In the right Actions pane, click Advanced Settings; you will see a screen.
Click the physical path parameter, and either type in the new path location or click the ellipsis button to browse to the new location.
After you have configured your new directory, click Finish.
After you have changed the configuration in IIS, go to the original file location for the website, and copy and paste the contents to the new location.

Work with Applications

Most of your websites will contain some type of dynamic content, most likely generated from an application on your web server. One of the areas you need to understand is how IIS works with applications. Specifically, you need to understand the nature of application pools and how they provide your server stability.

Application pools allow you to separate running applications on your web server. Therefore, if one application crashes on your server, it will not impact any other applications currently running on your web server. Working with application pools allows you to configure how applications are run on your server. However, working with application pools means you need to understand how the applications need to run on your server. Often times, you will need to speak to a website developer to make sure you provide the proper support for the application.

When you create an application pool, you need to know a couple of aspects about the application you are going to support. First, you need to know whether the application is running using managed code; this typically means the application requires the .NET Framework to run properly. Second, you will want to know how the application pipe will be managed so you know if you should choose either Integrated or Classic. Classic is provided for backward compatibility for application support and simply means IIS will not use the IIS integrated pipeline for managed code. Again, take the time for a quick conversation to help provide adequate support to your web developers.

Recycle Applications

One last task you may need to perform from time to time is recycling your application pool. This will help free up resources on your web server in case an application encounters an error. Recycling your application pools periodically will allow you to maintain your applications and keep them running smoothly. You can set recycling to occur on regular intervals, or you can recycle an application pool immediately. When you recycle an application pool, you essentially clear up system resources and system state information. This could negatively impact users of your website, so you need to try to recycle the applications in off-hours. When you recycle an application pool on your server, all existing session state data will be lost on your server. If the application you are recycling depends on the session state data, any users with active connections may encounter problems when you recycle the application pool. This is why you should try to make sure you recycle the applications during downtime, if possible, to minimize the impact on users.

Start Server Manager by selecting the icon from the taskbar and then choosing IIS Manager from the Tools menu.
In the navigation tree, expand your server.
Click Application Pools.
Click the application pool you want to recycle.
If you want to recycle the application pool immediately, click Recycle in the Actions pane on the right. The recycle request will process immediately. If you want to set regular recycle intervals, click Recycling in the Actions pane on the right.
If you clicked Recycling, you will see a screen.
The recycling conditions will allow you to set a variety of conditions when you recycle. You can set the time intervals, number of requests, specific time, or even the memory usage of an application. When you are done selecting your conditions, click Next.
You can also create event log entries when a recycling process has occurred on your server. The choices you will see in the event logs will be based on the selections you made on the recycling conditions. When you are done selecting your logging options, click Finish.

Integrate PHP Applications in IIS

One of the tasks you may be asked to perform as a web administrator is to provide support of PHP applications on your IIS web server. IIS provides full support for working with PHP applications on the IIS platform. From an IT perspective, all you need to do is know how the components in IIS provide support for these applications and how you can maintain them. One of the great things about this support is that to IIS, whether the application is PHP or not, it is treated like any other applications. It will have application pools, and you will be able to support multiple versions of PHP on the same server.

Before you can begin working with your PHP applications in IIS, you need to make sure you have installed the proper IIS component to provide the PHP applications with the backend support they will need. In the case of IIS, you will need to install the CGI component located under the Application Development section of IIS. This component installs the underlying framework called FastCGI that provides the necessary support for PHP applications to run properly on IIS.

Install CGI on IIS

You can install CGI during the normal IIS installation or after you have already installed IIS. To install CGI if you already have installed IIS, you will need to install the additional role service.

Open Server Manager by selecting the icon in the taskbar.
Select Add Roles And Features.
Select Role-based or Feature-based Installation. Click Next.
Select the desired server from the server pool. Click Next.
Select Web Server IIS and click Next.
Click Next on the Select Features screen.
Click Next on the Web Server Role (IIS) screen.
Expand Web Server.
Select CGI in the Application Development section, and click Next.
Review the Confirmation screen and your selections, and when you are ready, click Install.
Review the Summary screen, correct any error messages, and click Close.

After you have installed CGI onto your IIS server, you will need to download the version of PHP required for your web server. You can find the latest version at http://windows.php.net/download/#php-5.4. When you go to download the PHP package, you will see two versions for Windows; one is titled thread-safe, and another is non-thread-safe. You want to download the non-thread-safe version of PHP for your IIS server on Windows Server 2012. The built-in FastCGI component will handle the necessary thread process checks for process integrity normally handled by the thread-safe version of PHP. This means better performance for the PHP applications loaded on your server.

Using thread-safe PHP will typically ensure your applications' threads run properly, in order, and safely. Typically, this is a very good thing. Even though this may impact performance, making sure the applications run properly and smoothly is vital.

Non-thread-safe applications will try to execute the threads process as quickly as the threads can be called and executed. This sometimes means the threads bump into other threads or run improperly. The advantage of non-thread-safe applications is typically performance.

So, this is the age-old question of performance versus reliability and is why IIS is so special. The FastCGI component built into IIS on Windows Server 2012 will make sure the threads are executed safely. In a sense, it takes the place of the thread-safe version of PHP in regard to thread safety. You can expect the non-thread-safe PHP package to run faster with reliability on your IIS server.

You also need to make several changes to your PHP.ini file for the applications to run properly. You have to locate and uncomment the following sections in your PHP.ini file:

Set fastcgi.impersonate=1.
Set cgi.fix_pathinfo=1.
Set cgi.force_redirect=0.
Set open_basedir to point to a folder or network path where the content of the website is located. By default, on a IIS server, this is c:\inetpub\wwwroot.
Set extension_dir to the location where the PHP extensions reside. If you have installed PHP with the default settings, you would most likely set this parameter to extension_dir = "./ext".

Lastly, you need to set the application association for PHP applications when they are accessed by your web server. In IIS, this is called the handler mappings and is similar to mapping a file extension to a program such as .doc for Microsoft Word. The PHP applications will have the .php extension. IIS will need to know how to process the files when the requests come. With the newer PHP version (beginning at IIS 7) for Windows packages, this handler mapping is created; however, if it does not exist, you will have to configure the IIS handler mapping. This will make sure that when it processes a .php file, it passes the component to the FastCGI component.

Open IIS Management Console by starting the Server Manager from the icon in the taskbar and selecting IIS Manager from the Tools menu.
Click your server or website in the console tree on the left.
Double-click Handler Mappings in the center pane of the IIS console.
Look for an option in the Path column with a value of *.php. If one exists, double-click the mapping.
If you do not see a *.php handler mapping, click Add Module Mapping on the right action list. Configure the mapping with the following settings, which assume you used the default installation settings for PHP:
- Request Path: *.php
- Module: FastCGIModule
- Executable: Location of PHP installation (for example, c:\program files\php\php-cgi.exe)
- Name: Can be any value you want