Setup A Web Site

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Setup a WebSite

This document describes how to setup a website on Windows 7 using IIS 7. We begin with a description of installing IIS, and then describe how to proceed from there.

Index

Install IIS

Microsoft provides a good explanation of how to set up IIS. However, you can also just follow this simple steps:

The Internet Information Server Manager

You turn on (install) the Internet Information Server Manager (IIS Management Console) as described in the previous section. Here are two ways to start the IIS manager once you have it installed:

  1. Type inetmgr in the Search Box
  2. Use the Control Panel
    1. System and Security\Administrative Tools

Use the IIS Manager to Set up the Site

Use the Internet Information Server Manager to create a web site. You do this by right clicking on the Sites node in the Connections pane and choosing Add Web Site.

When creating your own site, it is nice to use standard defaults. For learning purposes (put not for production sites!), you can use the following defaults:

Adding a Web Site in IIS

Now put a simple HTML file named index.html in the directory you chose, which in this case is J:\Web\MyTestSite01.

After creating the site and your default document, choose Browse *:XXXX (http) from the Actions pane to view your site. In this case, it is http://localhost:8350/. You might well get an error at this point. Open Windows Explorer, right click on your directory and choose **properties.**Make sure that IUSR is listed in the security page.

Checking for IUSR in the security page

Another potential source of trouble involves setting up a hole in your Firewall as explained here somewhere around slide ten. The relevant slide shows how to let something through a Windows firewall by taking the following steps:

If everything is working, copy the url, which will be something like http://localhost:8350 and paste it into Expression web by selectiong the following from the Expression Web Menu: **Site | Settings | Preview.**Paste it into the edit control labeled "Preview using custom URL for this website:"

Setting up the preview capability in Expression Web

Now when you press F12 you should be able to get to your site, and view it correctly.

Step By Step

Sometimes it is best to go through a step by step setup process. I'm assuming that you are using IIS, but the process is similar for Apache.

  1. First Make sure you can browse to http://localhost and see the classic IIS Welcome screen or a document that you have replaced it with
  2. Then, if you have created another local site, make sure you can browse to a simple document on your local web site using LocalHost plus a port number in your URL: http://localhost:8000, where the port number can differ
  3. Then make sure you can browse to the same document using your IP address: http://192.168.0.101:8000, where the IP address and port number may vary. Or, if you are not using a port number, then just browse to http://192.168.0.101, where the IP number may vary, but where you should see the classic IIS welcome screen or some document you have put in its place
  4. Then make sure you can browse to this location from your Android phone, from Android X86 running in a VM, from Linux or some other box running in a VM, or from some other source other than your current OS. If this fails, but the other things work, then you probably have a firewall issue.
  5. Next, try to set up a cgi-bin folder, and put one of the simple scripts from the Python/SampleScripts folder of our Mercurial Repository in it, and make sure you can run that script. There are many notes on debugging problems with that process on Elvenware.
  6. Now trying setting up and running PythonAddingMachine from the HtmlCssJavaScript folder in the repository. It should be working in your web site.
  7. Finally, try to run PythonAddingDatabase, which involves setting up MySQL.

If you have all of the above running smoothly, then it should be relatively easy to move on to creating your own PhoneGap and HTML 5 programs that run against the database.

My key point here is to start with the simplest case, and move to increasingly complex cases. One (among many) of the advantages of this strategy is that you can tell me exactly where things went wrong for you. I got through Step 5, but then when I tried to... Etc.

Web Platform Installer

 

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