Create IIS Website with Rake

Question

I am using rake and albacore to build my .net ASP MVC project, however one part I have not been able to automate so far is deploying the built project to IIS. Currently on developer machines I get the developers to manually create the websites and link them to a released output folder generated by the build.

However now that we have our CI box setup (Teamcity) I am needing to automate the setup of the website to IIS, so are there any rake tasks which can create a website on IIS? I remember seeing one a while back but cannot find it.

I can install the IIS 6 meta scripting stuff (cant remember its exact name) and any other iis plugins, the box currently runs IIS 7.5.

== Edit ==

The one I remember seeing a while back was InetMgr (https://github.com/typesafe/inetmgr), which seems a little unstable and doesn't work for me but doesn't seem to be supported any further.

Answer 1

Not the best of answers, but as I couldn't find anything simpler than the proposed method below I just wrote something myself using appcmd:

def create_web_site(site_name, site_location, site_port)
  delete_command = "#{$file["appcmd"]} delete site #{site_name}"
  result = system delete_command
  puts "Failed to delete site on IIS: #{$?}" unless result

  add_command = "#{$file["appcmd"]} add site /name:#{site_name} /bindings:http/*:#{site_port}: /physicalPath:#{site_location}"
  result = system add_command
  raise "Failed to add site on IIS: #{$?}" unless result

  set_app_pool_command = "#{$file["appcmd"]} set app #{site_name}/ /applicationPool:\"ASP.NET v4.0\""
  result = system set_app_pool_command
  raise "Failed to bind site to .net 4 app pool on IIS: #{$?}" unless result

  start_site_command = "#{$file["appcmd"]} start site #{site_name}"
  result = system start_site_command
  raise "Failed to start site on IIS: #{$?}" unless result
end

$file["appcmd"] in the above is a global file lookup for my build scripts, this is c:/windows/system32/inetsrv.

I would love to find a nicer solution so if anyone comes across a nicer way of doing this add the answer and I will change the correct answer if it is any better. The only 2 libraries for doing this I found were dolphin deploy and 7 digital's iis rake script, neither of which seemed well documented on how to use unfortunately.

Answer 2

I suggest you check out Capistrano. Capistrano is deployment "framework" for ruby/rails/... applications. Check out getting started part of documentation and then look at this "tutorial" on how to deploy to Windows Server with Capistrano.