How to specify application pool identity user and password from PowerShell

Question

I have been having lots of difficulty automating the setup of a Web application and configuring IIS appropriately with the Application Pool Identity. I am doing this in a Web application deployment script written in PowerShell. My requirement is that I need my PowerShell script to set the application pool identity user to a specific service account mydomain\svcuser and password. Here is the sample code:

$pool = New-Item "IIS:\AppPools\MyAppPool" -Force
$svcuser = "mydomain\svcuser"
$pool.processModel.userName = $svcuser
$password = "somepassword"
$pool.processModel.password = $password
$pool.processModel.identityType = 3
$pool | Set-Item -ErrorAction Stop

When I run this, everything appears to work correctly--no errors are thrown and the application identity user name appears in IIS--but for some reason the password does not get set correctly, if at all. Since it is a password I cannot verify whether it has been set, but I can conclude that it if it is, it is not set correctly. It will not authenticate the resulting application pool user until I manually go in and enter the password in IIS. As a result the application fails after being deployed to the Web server and requires manual intervention.

Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

You would do this as follows:

Import-Module WebAdministration
Set-ItemProperty IIS:\AppPools\app-pool-name -name processModel -value @{userName="user_name";password="password";identitytype=3}

See this document here for an explanation, and a reference of the indentity type numeric for the user type you will run the app pool under: http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.applicationhost/applicationpools/add/processmodel