Wildcard hostname in IIS Express + VS 2015

Question

I have a multi-tenant application that is accessed in production as customer.ourdomain.com. For local development with IIS, we use a custom wildcard domain, company-localdev.com.

With IIS, this works without any particular configuration. IIS Express, on the other hand, only binds to localhost.

We have an ongoing migration project to ASP.NET 5, and we'd like to use IIS Express for an easier developer experience.

Is it possible to have IIS Express listen to *.company-localdev.com:1234? Bonus points if this can be automated so a developer can have it working just by opening the solution in IIS.

Answer 1

I had this exact same issue with IIS Express in Visual Studio 2019. MSDN held the answer.

The value of this property is a colon-delimited string that includes the IP address, port, and host name of the binding. You can leave the host name blank.

This simple binding will accept all hostnames

<bindings>
    <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:1234:" />
</bindings>

Answer 2

In ASP.NET 5 / vNext, the config file is found in

~ProjectFolder~/.vs/config/applicationhost.config

From there, you can add new bindings like rdans explained.

Answer 3

Ok I got it working on my local machine, here are all the steps I had to take:

1. Go to {YourProjectFolder}\.vs\config and edit the applicationhost.config file:

       <site name="MySite" id="2">
           <application path="/" applicationPool="Clr4IntegratedAppPool">
               <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="{MyProjectFolderPath}" />
           </application>
           <bindings>
               <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:49861:localhost" />
               <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:example.com" />
               <!-- for subdomain testing only -->
               <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:sub1.example.com" />
               <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:sub2.example.com" />
           </bindings>
       </site>
   

2. Run Notepad as Administrator and go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc to open the hosts file and amend it like so

   127.0.0.1 example.com
127.0.0.1 sub1.example.com
127.0.0.1 sub2.example.com

3. Add the url reservation by running cmd.exe as Administrator and typing in the netsh http prompt (to get the netsh http> prompt, you must type netsh followed by Enter, then http followed by Enter):

   add urlacl url=http://example.com:80/ user=everyone

   add urlacl url=http://sub1.example.com:80/ user=everyone

   add urlacl url=http://sub2.example.com:80/ user=everyone

Bear in mind that the keyword everyone depends on the language of your Windows OS. On a French OS, user=everyone shall be replaced by user="Tout le monde", on a German OS it should be user=jeder, in Spanish user=todos etc... you get the idea.

4. Then after that you should be able to start debugging and navigate to the domain you have setup to see your website.

Hope this helps.