Umbraco User's Guide

INSTALLATION TROUBLESHOOTING

By the time you have arrived at this chapter you have probably already successfully installed Umbraco, perhaps even multiple times. Then comes the time when your Umbraco installation fails. What to do? A methodical approach to identifying the issue goes a long way toward a quick solution.

Unless the issue is very obvious, perhaps an error message that states the problem, review the following checklist to help identify the cause:

• Are file permissions set correctly?
• Is Umbraco configured in a virtual directory?
• Does the IIS application pool .NET Runtime version match the Umbraco .NET runtime version?
• Are all of the files present?

Each item of this checklist is examined in greater detail in the following sections.

Are File Permissions Set Correctly?

File permissions are by far the most common issue with Umbraco installations. The identity of the IIS application pool must have sufficient permissions to be able to read, write, and modify certain files in your Umbraco instance. For local and development installations, granting the IIS application pool identity read, write, and modify rights to all files located in your instance is sufficient. For production sites, best practice is to grant the IIS application pool identity more granular rights because not all files should have these permissions applied.

You can locate the identity of an IIS application pool by viewing the Advanced Settings of the application pool from IIS Manager (see Figure 14-1). On most ...