How to fix "could not find a base address that matches schema http"... in WCF

Question

I'm trying to deploy a WCF service to my server, hosted in IIS. Naturally it works on my machine :)

But when I deploy it, I get the following error:

This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.

Googling on this, I find that I have to put a serviceHostingEnvironment element into the web.config file:

<serviceHostingEnvironment>
  <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
    <add prefix="http://mywebsiteurl"/&gt;
  </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>

But once I have done this, I get the following:

Could not find a base address that matches scheme http for the endpoint with binding BasicHttpBinding. Registered base address schemes are [https].

It seems it doesn't know what the base address is, but how do I specify it? Here's the relevant section of my web.config file:

<system.serviceModel>
  <serviceHostingEnvironment>
    <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
      <add prefix="http://mywebsiteurl"/&gt;
    </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
  </serviceHostingEnvironment>

  <behaviors>
    <serviceBehaviors>
      <behavior name="WcfPortalBehavior">
        <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
        <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true"/>
      </behavior>
    </serviceBehaviors>
  </behaviors>
  <bindings>
    <basicHttpBinding>
      <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_IWcfPortal"
               maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647"
               receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"
               openTimeout="00:10:00" closeTimeout="00:10:00">
        <readerQuotas maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647"
               maxStringContentLength="2147483647"/>
      </binding>
    </basicHttpBinding>
  </bindings>

  <services>
    <service behaviorConfiguration="WcfPortalBehavior" name="Csla.Server.Hosts.Silverlight.WcfPortal">
      <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="Csla.Server.Hosts.Silverlight.IWcfPortal"
      bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IWcfPortal">
      </endpoint>
      <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>
    </service>
  </services>
</system.serviceModel>

Can anybody shed some light on what's going on and how to fix it?

Thanks!

Craig

Answer 1

Any chance your IIS is configured to require SSL on connections to your site/application?

Answer 2

If it is hosted in IIS, there is no need to specify a base address, it will be the address of the virtual directory.

Answer 3

There should be a way to solve this pretty easily with external config sections and an extra deployment step that drops a deployment specific external .config file into a known location. We typically use this solution to handle the different server configurations for our different deployment environments (Staging, QA, production, etc) with our "dev box" being the default if no special copy occurs.

Answer 4

Confirmed my fix:

In your web.config file you should configure it to look as such:

<system.serviceModel >
    <serviceHostingEnvironment configSource=".\Configurations\ServiceHosting.config" />
    ...

Then, build a folder structure that looks like this:

/web.config
/Configurations/ServiceHosting.config
/Configurations/Deploy/ServiceHosting.config

The base serviceHosting.config should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true">
    <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
    </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>

while the one in /Deploy looks like this:

<serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true">
    <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
        <add prefix="http://myappname.web707.discountasp.net"/&gt;
    </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>

Beyond this, you need to add a manual or automated deployment step to copy the file from /Deploy overtop the one in /Configurations. This works incredibly well for service address and connection strings, and saves effort doing other workarounds.

If you don't like this approach (which scales well to farms, but is weaker on single machine), you might consider adding a web.config file a level up from the service deployment on the host's machine and put the serviceHostingEnvironment node there. It should cascade for you.

Answer 5

If you want to use baseAddressPrefixFilters in web.config, you must setup IIS (6) too. This helped me:

1/ In IIS find your site. 2/ Properties / Web site (tab) / IP address -> Advanced button 3/ Add new host header on the same port which you will use in web.config.