Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Managing URL Rewrite

As this book has covered in other chapters, there is more than one way to manage IIS, and URL Rewrite is no exception.

It's important to understand the different methods so that you can follow along in this chapter and so that you have flexibility in your day-to-day management of URL Rewrite rules. URL Rewrite can be managed through all of the regular methods, including IIS Manager, Configuration Editor, AppCmd, PowerShell, a text editor, and all the Application Programming Interface (API) methods. Let's take a look at the three most common.

Using IIS Manager

IIS Manager fully supports URL Rewrite rules, and unless you work with URL Rewrite on a daily basis so that you can memorize the full syntax, you may find that it's easiest to do everything through IIS Manager.

However, if you want to communicate a rule to someone else—whether you're asking for help or helping someone else—it's often useful to show the XML configuration, as discussed in the next section. So, you may find that you will use a combination of IIS Manager plus a text editor to manage the rules.

You will likely find that it's easy to read XML-based rules and re-create them in IIS Manager. Throughout this chapter there will be XML examples that don't explain all the IIS Manager steps, but you will probably find that you can create them in IIS Manager quite easily.

Using a Text Editor

If you like to work directly with the configuration through a text editor, or if you want to share your rules ...