502.5 error when deploying asp.net core website using IIS

Question

I have an ASP.NET Core 1.0 application which has been successfully deployed and running on our pre-prod server for months. Today I tried deploying the website to our production server using this article as a guideline: https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/publishing/iis.html

Bottom line is we can't get past this error:

HTTP Error 502.5 - Process Failure

Common causes of this issue:
* The application process failed to start
* The application process started but then stopped
* The application process started but failed to listen on the configured port

We tried the ideas listed in this article, but still no luck: ASP.NET Core 1.0 on IIS error 502.5

How do you go about debugging a 502.5 error, to get to the actual cause of the failure?

The app's log files are getting created, but unfortunately they are empty. The web server's Event Viewer contains this entry:

Process was created with commandline 'D:\Applications\PVP\UserInterface.exe' but failed to get the status, errorCode = 0x80070005

Any help would be very much appreciated! Tory.

Answer 1

Try to isolate whether the problem is the server (IIS) or the app. Do that by finding and running the app directly. Find your web.config and run the process.

For a DLL this is:

dotnet MyApp.dll

For an EXE this is:

MyApp.exe

For you this probably means running D:\Applications\PVP\UserInterface.exe directly.

Answer 2

I've been struggling with this with a .NET Core 2.0 site and once I realized that IIS needs a web.config on the server, I got past it.

Here is my file, the key elements for me were the processPath and arguments.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
<handlers>
  <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified" />
</handlers>
<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" 
    arguments=".\My App.dll" 
    stdoutLogEnabled="true" 
    stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" />
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>