Hosting Umbraco in IIS

Configuring IIS for .NET 5

• Install the ".NET Core Runtime" and download the Hosting Bundle. Ensure you download the correct .NET version as per the requirements.

• Once you have the hosting bundle installed and have restarted IIS (net stop was /y followed by net start w3svc), create a site in IIS as you would for a v8 site, however you need to ensure that ".NET CLR version" is set to "No Managed Code" for the Application Pool.

Publish website for manual deployment to IIS

You can use the dotnet CLI to compile and collate all files required for hosting

dotnet publish -o ../deployment-artefacts -f net5.0

Alternatively you can use folder or ftp publishing in Visual Studio to compile and collate all required files to for the application to run.

In Visual Studio right click on Umbraco web project in the Solution Explorer and choose Publish... command.

Environment Variables in ApplicationHost.config

In the Management section you find the Configuration Editor:

One section is of particular interest:

• In the first, left hand dropdown list (Section:) choose: system.webServer/aspNetCore section.

• In the second, right hand dropdown list (From:) choose: ApplicationHost.config <location path='[YOUR-SITENAME]'>. This ensures your settings will be stored in a machine specific file and not the website's web.config. The web.config might end in a public repository and should not contain sensitive data like Connection Strings or SMTP configuration with username and password. Additionally by default the web.config will be overwritten during each publish processes.

Find the line named environmentVariables and open the dialog to add environment variables. These work similar to the launchSettings. E.g. you can define ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT and create an appSettings.[ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT].json file. Or even better create environment variables for sensitive settings like passwords. There are some differences to launchSettings.json configuration:

• Variable names need to change the object structure form JSON by combining the segments with double underscore __ e.g. ConnectionStrings__umbracoDbDSN

• escaped backslashes \\ e.g. serverName\\databaseInstanceName are replaced by single backslash \ e.g. DATABASESERVER123\SQL2017

IIS Hosting models

IIS can host .NET 5 applications using 2 different hosting models

• In-process (default)

• In-process hosting runs an .NET 5 app in the same process as its IIS worker process

• Out-of-process - to enable this model you need to edit your .csproj file and add:

<PropertyGroup>
  <AspNetCoreHostingModel>OutOfProcess</AspNetCoreHostingModel>
</PropertyGroup>

Out-of-process .NET 5 apps run in a separate from the IIS worker process. The module controls the management of the Kestrel server and requests are proxied between them.