I’ve had Windows 8 installed for a while now and I finally decided to try and setup a small test site using IIS 8, the latest version of Internet Information Services that runs on Windows 8. In this article, I’ll show you how to install IIS 8 on Windows 8 and setup a new website. If you have any questions, post a comment.
The first thing we’ll need to do is install IIS 8 via the Control Panel. Check out my previous post on different ways to access the Control Panel in Windows 8. Once you are there, click on Programs and Features.
Next click on Turn Windows features on and off in the left-hand column.
Now scroll down until you see Internet Information Services in the list. Go ahead and click in the empty checkbox next to the title. It should turn into a small black square.
Note that having the black square instead of the checkmark just means that not all of the sub-items are being installed. For example, by default, checking IIS will not install the FTP server option. If you want to install FTP Server, you have to expand the + box and manually check it. Go ahead and click OK at this point and Windows 8 will install IIS 8. You shouldn’t need the DVD to install IIS.
Once it has finished, you should be able to load the default website by going to your IE and tying in //localhost. This should bring up the IIS 8 default web page.
Next, you can then go to Control Panel and click on Administrative Tools. Here you will see Internet Information Services (IIS) Manger. You’ll get the familiar IIS console screen:
On the left hand side, you can expand out the server to see the list of sites. To start, you only have the Default Web Site, which is stored under C:\inetpub\wwwroot.
To setup a new website in IIS 8, right-click on Sites and choose Add Website.
Give your site a name and browse to the physical path where the web files are stored.
In the Binding section, you can specify what IP address the website should be listening on and which port. You can also specify a host name if your computer has a static public IP address with DNS records for the domain name pointing to that IP address. In this post, I won’t go into how to access your website from outside your local network.
Click OK and you’ll get a warning about how another site is already using the same settings and therefore it will conflict. That’s because the default website is also set to All Unassigned for the IP address and port 80. I just stopped the default website and started my test website. Then when I visited //localhost again, my new index.html file came up:
That’s it, now you can start playing around with the settings to configure your website. A good place to start is the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which is a tool that quickly sets you up with all the different Microsoft web components like SQL Server Express, .NET Framework, Visual Web Developer, and lots more. Enjoy!