.htaccess files when hosting Drupal 6 sites on IIS 7?

Question

I want to run Drupal 6 on our Windows 2008 server using the included IIS 7 web server. There are a few blogs giving various instructions on doing so, but when I try to create Drupal sites and/or active some modules using IIS 7, I get error messages about creating folders and/or missing .htaccess files.

It looks like Drupal relies on .htaccess files to configure some of the security for the Drupal instances.

Is this a deal-breaker when trying to run Drupal 6 on IIS 7? Anybody actually running a production Drupal 6 site under IIS 7?

Doug

Answer 1

IIS 7 is vastly superior to earlier versions when it comes to deploying Drupal. For one thing, it now includes an equivalent to mod_rewrite, the "URL Rewrite module", and can be configured both from its admin console (as was always the case) and from rather understandable XML files (web.config), not more complicated than .htaccess files. You no longer need ISAPI_Rewrite.

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1691

However, it doesn't take into account .htaccess files automatically, which means access control is still something you have to configure by hand.

Good tutorial about the .htaccess to web.config process here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/557/notes-on-translating-htaccess-files-to-webconfig/

This being said, for commercial deployment, you will probably still want to use a supported Apache stack instead, like Zend Server.

Answer 2

Personally I don't consider IIS a reasonable solution for a public facing Drupal site. You may be able to get it to work, but you will spend so much additional time configuring things that it's worth the effort to learn to configure Apache instead.