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

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 2

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.

Answer 3

Havent tried it with vs2015 but this works with iis express in vs 2012.

go to your documents folder. Open up IISExpress/config.applicationhost.config.

search for the 'sites' xml tag and find your site. You can modify your site bindings from here like so:

<bindings>
    <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:1234:company-localdev.com" />
</bindings>

Debugging only works for me if I run visual studio as an administrator.