I'm really new to setting up web servers in general. I've got IIS 8 on Windows 8, and I'm trying to set up a little site locally, while doing some development. In IIS I choose Add Site, give a name, points to a location where I have a index.html file (I've tried different locations, latest in a c:\inetpub\wwwroot\test -folder) and otherwise use all default settings. However, when I try to browse to localhost I get
HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.
I've verified the pool is started, and I've given IIS_IUSRS Full Control on the target folder
I've search around but not found anything that solved my issue, and there's nothing helpfull in the EventLog or in the C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\HTTPERR folder
Could anyone tell me what's wrong?
It could be that the user identity is outdated, especially if you've tried starting a stopped app pool and the next request again fails.
In IIS, go to the Application Pools under the Server, then find the correct Application Pool for your web site, and click on it. On the Advanced Settings menu to the right, select Identity and change it and enter new user and password. Click on your Application Pool again, and select Recycle to restart it.
You can also try looking at the error message in Event Viewer, under Windows Logs, Application, Details tab.
Other answers are fine. But in my case, I was working on a Windows box that already was running some old IIS, IISExpress or any other web site. What happened is urls ACLs where reserved somehow in the system. So, you might want to check this.
Here is the console command to dump all URL acls:
netsh http show urlacl
Check what's returned here, and if anything matches the url you are testing, here is the command to delete one URL acl (for example):
netsh http delete urlacl url=http://localhost:2018/
(beware to carefully note what you do here in case it was not related to the original problem)
In my case the problem was the DefaultAppPool. I changed the "Load User Profile" to false and now it works. However, I don't know if there are side effects to this.
Further reading on setting the Load User Profile option: What exactly happens when I set LoadUserProfile of IIS pool?
Check your application's respective Application Framework Pool - it could be stopped. If it is, start it and check again.
If you're still experiencing issues you can also check out Event Viewer to find the cause of that error in order to troubleshoot more.
If the app pool is running under some specific user identity, then go to the advanced settings and update the username and password again to ensure they are correct.
If the app pool immediately stops after you start it and your event log shows:
The worker process for application pool 'APP_POOL_NAME' encountered an
error 'Cannot read configuration file ' trying to read configuration
data from file '\?\', line number '0'. The data field contains
the error code.
... you may experiencing a bug that was apparently introduced in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update and/or .Net Framework v4.7.1. It can be resolved via the following workaround steps, which are from this answer to the related question Cannot read configuration file ' trying to read configuration data from file '\\?\<EMPTY>', line number '0'.
Go to the drive your IIS is installed on, eg. C:\inetpub\temp\appPools\
Delete the directory (or virtual directory) with the same name as your app pool.
Recycle/Start your app pool again.
I have reported this bug to Microsoft by creating the following issue on the dotnet GitHub repo: After installing 4.7.1, IIS AppPool stops with "Cannot read configuration file".
EDIT
Microsoft responded that this is a known issue with the Windows setup process for the Fall Creators Update and was documented in KB 4050891, Web applications return HTTP Error 503 and WAS event 5189 on Windows 10 Version 1709 (Fall Creators Update). That article provides the following workaround procedure, which is similar to the one above. However, note that it will recycle all app pools regardless of whether they are affected by the issue.
Open a Windows PowerShell window by using the Run as administrator
option.
Run the following commands:
Stop-Service -Force WAS
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force C:\inetpub\temp\appPools\*
Start-Service W3SVC
Or if none of the current solutions work, look in your website's directory for a file called app_offline.htm. That basically tells IIS that your site is unavailable and to show this page instead.
To fix it, either delete it or rename it to app_offline.htm.bak.
In my case, I added it while showing a colleague how to use that to prevent traffic to the site temporarily and then forgot that I did that on my box. Sigh.
Start by looking in Event Viewer, either under the System or the Application log.
In my case the problem was that no worker process could be started for the App Pool because its configuration file couldn't be read - I had included an extra '.' at the end of its name.
I resolved this issue by removing a URL reservation that matched my app directory in IIS. I had a similar (definitely not the same) issue as outlined in this article:
A Not So Common Root Cause for 503 Service Unavailable
It is possible that your domain requires the account used for running the AppPool to have batch logon rights. In which case you will see this same error message. The way you can tell if that is the case, is by looking at the System events in the Event Viewer. There should be an event saying that the account being used with the App Pool has either 'the wrong password or does not have batch logon rights'.
This is why developers quite often use IIS Express on their development machine, since it by passes the batch logon rights issue.
I ran into the same issue, but it was an issue with the actual site settings in IIS.
Select Advanced Settings... for your site/application and then look at the Enabled Protocols value. For whatever reson the value was blank for my site and caused the following error:
HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.
The fix was to add in http and select OK. The site was then functional again.
For my case, My Default Application Pool was offline.
To troubleshoot the problem, I checked the IIS logs located in C:\Windows\System32\LogFile\HTTPERR. Scroll down to the most recent error logs, this will show you problems with IIS if any.
My Error was "503 1 AppOffline DefaultPool"
Solution
Open IIS Manager
Click on Application Pools, this lists all application pool to your right.
Check if the application pools hosting your api or site has a stop sign on it. If so, right click the application pool and click start.
Try again to access your service from the client
Check Event Viewer - Windows - Application. If there is a red Error line made from IIS-W3SVC-WP and the message is like The Module DLL C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\rewrite.dll failed to load. The data is the error. then you are missing some Windows Setup features.
In Windows Server 2012 go to Server Manager, Add Roles and Features, Web Server (IIS) and add the matching feature. Usually, most of the Application Development section is installed. Here is a complete list of IIS features and their associated DLL to help in diagnosis.
After going through a few iterations of that I ended on the error message above regarding "rewrite.dll". This led to a direct download and install of Microsoft URL Rewrite tool. Finally all websites came to life.
Our server ran out of disk space on Sunday afternoon which led to an application suddenly failing and returning HTTP error 502. The logs were empty so it had to be something that was occurring before IIS even did anything.
A swift look at the event viewer(WIN+R > eventvwr) exposed the issue.
It's a good idea to filter out the output of the System and Application windows to WAS since it can get pretty verbose in there.
The application depended on another one which was disabled. Therefore keep in mind an application can go down indirectly if one of it's dependent processes has gone down. We simply re-enabled the .NET application pool and our other application started running normally again.
If you have IIS URL Rewriting installed it could be to do with that. I suffered issues after a Windows 10 Update.
This StackOverflow post helped me.
Go to Windows Control Panel > Programs and Features > IIS URL Rewrite Module 2 > Repair.
i see this error after install url rewrite module i try to install previous version of it from:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7435
it fixed my error
In my case, the problem was that another application was using the port that I had bound to my web site.
I found it by running the following command from a command line, which lists all of the listening ports and the executable involved:
netstat -b
If you have McAfee HIPS and if you see the following error in event viewer application log:
The Module DLL C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\HipIISEngineStub.dll failed to load.
The data is the error.
Then this workaround on McAfee.com resolved the issue in my case.
Quote from the page:
Click Start, Run, type explorer and click OK.
Navigate to: %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config
Open the file applicationHost.config as Administrator for editing in Notepad.
Edit the <globalModules> section and remove the following line:
<add name="MfeEngine" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\HipIISEngineStub.dll" />
Edit the <modules> section and remove the following line:
<add name="MfeEngine" />
After you have finished editing the applicationHost.config file, save the file, then restart the IIS server using iisreset or by restarting the system.
Actually, in my case https://localhost was working, but http://localhost gave a HTTP 503 Internal server error. Changing the Binding of Default Web Site in IIS to use the hostname localhost instead of a blank host name.
tname for http binding
This could also happen if any recent installs or updates happened with .NET framework and/or ASP.NET. If you are unsure of what happened recently and if all your apps use ASP.NET version 4, you can try reset them by running the following commands in command prompt in administrator mode.
cd C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319
aspnet_regiis -i
This makes sure to install or reinstall ASP.NET 4 and updates existing applications to use ASP.NET 4 version of the app pool. It updates both IIS Classic and Integrated mode handlers and script mappings in the IIS metabase. It also recreates ASP.NET v4.0 and ASP.NET v4.0 Classic app pools, and sets .NET framework 4 to DefaultAppPool and Classic .NET app pools.
I changed the port from 80 to 8080, that's why this error occur. I write localhost/ in search bar then this error occur. My problem is resolved by writing localhost:8080/ in the search then local host open.
This happened to me on a server on our intranet. After browsing through blog posts and Windows logs, it turned out that a few days before Christmas 2015 (related to a Windows Update?) my web site application pool wanted to create a config file in folder c:\inetpub\temp\appPools, but access to this folder was restricted. This caused the application pool to be disabled.
After adding Full control to Everyone on this temp folder, I restarted the Windows Process Activation Service and everything went online again.
If I'd been a little more elegant, it would probably had been enough to grant the AppPool user full control to the folder, but I never seem to remember how the app pool name and app pool user relates to eachother...
Same thing with IIS Express 10.0 after upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10.
Solution: go to IIS and enable all disabled websites and reinstall ASP.NET Core.
Also check the address bar and make sure the page is in the right location.
This error can be returned instead of the 404 (Page not found). In my case, it was a bad link on the page that didn't have a subfolder included.
I was having this problem when cleaning up my IIS on dev machine, and I had somehow created a virtual folder for a subfolder of my actual development web that I couldn't clear and was creating conflicts.
To clear it I had to use
C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe list vdir
and then individually remove the problem virtual directories using
C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe delete app /app.name:"Default Web Site"/{name of virtual directory}
For me the solution is to change Enable 32-bit Applications to False
None of the answers worked for me. So I'd like to share what I found after hours of research..
Keep seeing this message from event logs: The Module DLL C:\Windows\system32\RpcProxy\RpcProxy.dll failed to load. The data is the error. Turns out that dll is 64bit and cannot be loaded into 32bit process.
You can also try the following.
Right-click on the site and 'Basic Settings...'
Click on 'Connect As...'
Click on Specific User and give the new credentials.
Now it should work.
In my case, I had to change my userPass of network because company policies. So, you need to edit your AppPool:
click on Application Pools. Select your pool, 'advanced Settings...' go to 'Process Model' click on 'Identity' and Click on Specific User and give the new credentials.
This might be because of number of connections to the database. I had such a situation and so, wrote a de-constructor and killed db open connection and it resolved.
I had the same problem and found it was caused by permission problems creating the user profile in C:\Users. I gave ApplicationPoolIdentity full permissions to the C:\Users folder, started the site and everything worked, the profile must have been created properly, and my site worked as it should. I then removed access to C:\Users from ApplicationPoolIdentity.
Site wont start on local using ApplicationPoolIdentity, only when using NetworkService: "HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable."
I've been developing an ASP .NET 3.5 web application against Cassini, the built-in web development server, rather than against IIS.
In my Global.asax file, in the Application_Start event handler, I have some code which logs the fact that the website has started up. This all works fine with Cassini.
Since deploying the site to a virtual directory on a test server using IIS6, I am finding there are no log entries being written, and so I'm concluding that the Application_Start handler is not firing.
I then tried removing the virtual directory and running the site directly out of the root of the website on the test server, but it didn't make any difference - still no log entry for application start.
I know these events should fire irrespective of my deployment environment, has anyone got any ideas what is going wrong here?
I had a similar problem and I was wrestling with it for several days.
The initial problem was something else - cookies not being set in Application's EndRequest handler.
Finally I somehow managed to realize, that the problem actually was that the event is not being fired at all.
It took some time to find that out, because all was working fine on my machine.
But on the production server - quiet as a tomb.
I am only writing this, because I really hope to save from troubles at least one person.
The real reason for the problem was a missing global.asax file on the production server.
The global.asax file was present on my computer, because the development environment is located there.
I had prepared a deployment bat file, which coppies files from the development folder, removes the unnecessary ones and makes a package.
Well - the global.asax file was marked for deletion in that script.
After starting to deploy it all the problems went away.
I hope I helped.
If you make a request to your app does the "Application_Start" fire then? I don't believe it will be started until the first request is made.
How are you logging? Is it possible that your logging component is not correctly set up? For a quick test try throwing an exception inside Application_Start and that will tell you quickly whether or not the event is being raised.
In your deployed enviroment, what is the thing you're calling? The reason I ask is because if you're calling a WCF based web service (ending in .svc), then Applicaiton_Start will not fire as the call to WCF isn't going through the ASP.NET pipeline. This wouldn't necessarily rear it's head w/ Cassini.
You may be getting a runtime exception that is occurring before your .NET code even gets a chance to run. If you look under the Event Viewer's Application logs, you may see some warnings or errors that will clue you in to what is happening.
When you develop in Cassini you are running the application under the user's account- probably administrator. Once you've deployed to IIS, you are (hopefully) running under a lower privilidge account.
This lack of appropriate permissions is probably the reason why your application is not working correctly- I would check the security settings to write to the log (presumably you are writing to a log file?).
1) iisreset /stop
2) push the published code to iis virtual directory's physical folder.
3) iisreset /start
4) make web request
Still not sure after this. the do a Thread.Sleep(60000); and attach with remote debugger to the process w3wp.exe imagename.
There may be more than one process of that name but this one is managed code also doesn't hurt to attach to multiple. Set the break point after the sleep. After the one minute sleep step through.
I thought I had a similar problem, working on some old projects, I was under the impression that the global.asax was not running because the code would first go into building my authentication controller which would fail because of class not registered (that part happens in the global.asax).
Turned out it was due to a config item. When I moved the AuthenticationModule declaration into handler section in web config, it worked fine with IIS express.
Basically, because of a config item, another piece of code was being executed before global.asax, making me believe that it would not be called.
We tried a lot of things.
global.asax works on local computer but not after i publish to server
Global.asax is not publishing and event are not firing in Global.asax
Global.asax not firing for Release build
Mystery of Global.asax in ASP.NET MVC application
We also tried putting the below files in root and bin directories.
App_global.asax.dll and App_global.asax.compiled files
PrecompiledApp.config
None of it worked!
We had to put raw Global.asax instead of pre-compiled dll, in order to fire the global events, for our asp .net 2.0 website.
Hope this helps someone! Cheers! Happy coding! :D
My fix was an odd one. On my development machine I am using localhost and I changed the port number it used - and then it worked.
also in IIS Manager turn on Dot Net debugging. It's under "Compilation"
If a required dll is missing from the bin directory (for example there could be a 3rd party dll which has been used in your latest build, but accidently excluded from deployment), then the Application_Start will not fire.
My issue was resolved by adding the below compiled files in the bin folder.
App_global.asax.compiled
App_global.asax.dll
I have a question about asp.net compiling. I know the different ways you can compile but my question is with the default method.
Microsoft says that pages and code are compiled on their first use and then cached. My question is, when does that cache clear...
when the app pool recycles? Or, does it cache it until it's changed even through server reboots. Basically, if it compiles once and then caches it until it's changed I'm ok with it... if it recompiles with every reboot or app pool recycle I'm going to go the route of pre-compiling.
The cache is cleared upon app pool shutdown, at each app pool startup it is re-compiled and cached.
Whenever you change something to the source files it will recompile.
On startup (after shutdown) it will recompile too.
Changing something to the web.config reboots your web
So the files are created in a temp folder but do not get cleared on shutdown. They will only be recompiled if something changes. So if you restart IIS or reboot the machine, they will not recompile. Just reload them from the temp folder.
Changes to any of the files of the project, or any files the project is dependant on will cause a recompile.