Is there a way to publish a site from Visual Studio to an IIS without admin rights?

Question

As a local developer I'd like to be able to publish a site (via WebDeploy) from Visual Studio 2013 to an IIS (localhost) without starting Visual Studio with admin rights.

Is this possible and if so how?

I tried to Edit Permissions... for the site and give my account Modify rights but it doesn't seem to work... or I need to set something else too.

I did some more experimenting and tested also FTP-Deploy (ftps). It works without admin rights but it has a drawback. It's really really slow (localhost!) so I consider it as a last resort. I don't even want to think how long it runs when the site grows...

Answer 1

It doesn't work without running as administrator (or with elevated privileges).

The reason is that you need elevated privileges to the C:\inetpub\ folder, which is the default folder for IIS. You could (you shouldn't) disable UAC which is the original of this 'problem', but that is a workaround, and not a real solution.

I think creating a new website in IIS that points to another folder (one that isn't protected by UAC) solves the issue for you.