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One of the most significant improvements in Sitefinity 4 is the ease of installation. The new Project Manager encapsulates virtually all of the required elements for creating and managing new projects. Today we’ll take a brief walkthrough how simple it is to install Sitefinity on the IIS 7 platform.
To complement today's post, evangelist Gabe Sumner has compiled a detailed video, thoroughly walking through this process step-by-step. For a visual tour through Sitefinity 4 installation on IIS 7, check out the video below.
Video: Sitefinity 4.0 installation on Windows Server 2008
Before getting started, it’s important to make sure your system is already configured with the system requirements as outlined in the installation documentation. Refer to documentation for the latest updates, and a detailed walkthrough of IIS setup is also available. However for IIS 7 the basics are:
Note: the installer for SQL Server may require the .NET Framework 2.0. SQL Server may also be installed on a separate server, but it must be accessible from the server running the Sitefinity website.
Because some of the backend administration relies on Silverlight, it is important that your server is configured to host Silverlight applications. In most environments this is already the case. However, for additional help setting up Silverlight on your server, visit this article: "Configuring IIS for Silverlight Applications.
A number of options are available for installing Sitefinity on your server, including a simple XCOPY over the network or FTP upload.
For our example we’ll install a fresh site using the Sitefinity Project Manager.
This application allows you to create a fresh site (similar to the "Blank Project" from previous Sitefinity versions) containing everything needed to run Sitefinity.
The project manager is available as a free trial or if you have already registered, is available for download from your account.
It is not necessary to download the complete installer, as this is intended for your development environment. Simply download the project manager, the smaller download, around 50MB.
NOTE: It is not required to run the Project Manager on the web server; it can be launched from your development environment or other machine, then copied to the webserver using FTP or XCOPY.
Although there is an option in the Project Manager to install to IIS, that option installs the project to IIS as a Virtual Directory, as opposed to a full website. This is intended for a development environment, so be sure to use the “File System” option for your web server instead.
Once the website is installed on the server, it's time to register the site in IIS
Run IIS from the Start > Control Panel >Administrative Tools menu to see the list of websites available on your server. On a fresh install you will probably only have the Default Web Site.
For simplicity, we're going to disable the Default Web Site to free up the standard HTTP port 80 that it uses. This will allow us to use localhost to access our Sitefinity site instead of this default one. Simply select the Default Web Site then click "Stop" on the right panel to disable it.
Now add a new website by right-clicking "Sites" then selecting "Add Web Site". This will prompt you to configure your site.
Make sure the path matches up with the one that contains your site. If you already have an Application Pool designated, select it here, otherwise IIS will automatically create one for you that matches the name of your site..
Before your site is ready to run, there are few more items that need to be configured.
When naming your site, IIS automatically creates a new Application Pool to run it. By default, this is created to run ASP.NET version 2.0. Since Sitefinity requires 4.0, edit the pool by opening the properties in the Application Pool section.
Sitefinity configurations are stored in the App_Data folder, so as a result, the Application Pool must have write-permissions to this location, or you will get System.UnauthorizedAccessException such as “Access to the path ‘C:\inetpub\Sitefinity\App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration\SecurityConfig.Config is denied”.
This is easily corrected by right-clicking the site's App_Data folder to access the folder Security settings.
Click "Edit" to manage the list of users, then "Add" to manually add the user. The pool follows the naming convention IIS APPOOL\[AppPoolName], in our case using the AppPool name Sitefinity.
Add the user and grant it Modify rights. Note that you may need to provide a different user depending on how you configured the application pool for your site.
After saving your changes, you can now launch your site by navigating to http://localhost on the server, and for a fresh install, you should see the standard placeholder page for your site.
You can now access the backend of your site by navigating to http://localhost/sitefinity, which prompts you for to create a database connection.
Enter then credentials that match your environment, then quickly step through the various prompts, including admin setup, before finally being able to login to create your site.
We will explore different database deployment scenarios for existing sites in a future post
The Sitefinity Dashboard is now fully accessible and can be used to create pages, content, and everything else related to the site.
If you follow this guide and experience any issues, please share your feedback on our discussion forums. In our next post, we'll take a look at doing something similar with Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.
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