Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Troubleshooting URL Rewrite

When URL Rewrite works, it works great. And when a rule is created successfully, there is rarely a situation where it starts failing. However, what can cause you to pull your hair out is when creating the rules in the first place. Some things just don't just respond as you would expect, and it can be difficult to track down what's wrong. Following are some quick tips to help troubleshoot URL Rewrite.

Create a Testing Rule

One of the easiest and most flexible ways to troubleshoot URL Rewrite is to create a testing rule to confirm that a bare-bones rule will work. There are a few ways to do this.

If your site is still in development, the most elementary option is to create a rule at the server level with a “Match URL Pattern” of .* and an Abort Request action. To test, simply ensure that you can view your site before the rule is created, and then confirm that the request is aborted after the rule is created. After you've confirmed that URL Rewrite does indeed work, you can start adding back parts of your good rule until you track down the issue.

While unlikely, it is possible that URL Rewrite was installed incorrectly. (It has happened, although rarely.) Confirming that a basic rule works is a good way to confirm that URL Rewrite was installed correctly.

If you're running in production, your testing rules will need to have a condition filtered to just traffic used for testing. For example, you could add a condition for {REMOTE_ADDR} equaling your own IP ...