Recreate the default website in IIS

Question

Other answers are basically right, thanks to them I was able to restore my default web site, they're just missing some more or less important details.

This was the complete process to restore the Default Web Site in my case (IIS 7 on Windows 7 64bit):

1. open IIS Manager
2. right click Sites node under your machine in the Connections tree on the left side and click Add Website
3. enter "Default Web Site" as a Site name
4. set Application pool back to DefaultAppPool!
5. set Physical path to %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot
6. leave Binding and everything else as is

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Possible issues:

1. If the newly created web site cannot be started with the following message:

   Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager - The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070020)

   ...it's possible that port 80 is already assigned to another application (Skype in my case :). You can change the binding port to e.g. 8080 by right clicking Default Web Site and selecting Edit Bindings... and Edit.... See Error 0x80070020 when you try to start a Web site in IIS 7.0 for details. Or you can just close the application sitting on the port 80, of course.

2. Some applications require Default Web Site to have the ID 1. In my case, it got ID 1 after recreation automatically. If it's not your case, see Re-create “default Website” in IIS after accidentally deleting. It's different for IIS 6 and 7.

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Note: I had to recreate the Default Web Site, because I wasn't able to even open a project configured to run under IIS in Visual Studio. I had a solution with a couple of projects inside. One of the projects failed to load with the following error message:

The Web Application Project is configured to use IIS. The Web server 'http://localhost:8080/' could not be found.

After I have recreated the Default Web Site in IIS Manager, I was able to reload and open that specific project.

Did the same thing. Wasn't able to recreate Default Web Site directly - it kept complaining that the file already existed...

I fixed as follows:

1. Create a new web site called something else, eg. "Default", pointing to "C:\inetpub\wwwroot"
2. It should be created with ID 1 (at least mine was)
3. Rename the web site to "Default Web Site"

I suppose you want to publish and access your applications/websites from LAN; probably as virtual directories under the default website.The steps could vary depending on your IIS version, but basically it comes down to these steps:

Restore your "Default Website" Website :

1. create a new website

2. set "Default Website" as its name

3. In the Binding section (bottom panel), enter your local IP address in the "IP Address" edit.

4. Keep the "Host" edit empty

that's it: now whenever you type your local ip address in your browser, you will get the website you just added. Now if you want to access any of your other webapplications/websites from LAN, just add a virtual application under your default website pointing to the directory containing your published application/website. Now you can type : http://yourLocalIPAddress/theNameOfYourApplication to access it from your LAN.

You can try to restore your previous state by doing the following:

1. Go to IIS Manager
2. Right-click on your Local Computer.
3. Point to All Tasks
4. Point to Backup/Restore Configuration
5. Select the configuration you want to restore
6. Wait untill configuration applies