Virtual directory inside of ASP.NET Core app in IIS

Question

We have an application using ASP.NET Core 1.0 RC1 and hosted on IIS. It works fine. Now we have static content, that is available on a file share and should be accessible from the application.

Before ASP.NET 5, we added a virtual directory in IIS and could access the shared content easily. With our hosted ASP.NET 5 application, this unfortunately doesn't seem to work. We just get a 404 back when trying to access the static content.

Our application is using app.UseIISPlatformHandler() and app.UseStaticFiles(), but this doesn't work. We discovered that we could use app.UseFileServer() with custom FileServerOptions to get the desired behavior, but we are curious if it's also possible with the normal "old" way of adding a virtual directory in IIS.

Answer 1

I encountered this problem today, and finally managed to fix it. The trick (for me, probably not for everyone) is making sure the aspNetCore handler is disabled in the sub-application and enabled in the main (ASP.NET Core) application.

My ASP.NET Core app has a basic Web.config

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
        <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" type="" modules="AspNetCoreModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" allowPathInfo="false" preCondition="" responseBufferLimit="4194304" />
    </handlers>
    <aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\myapp.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="true" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" />
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

and the application added as a sub-application in IIS has

<configuration>
  <!-- removed -->
  <system.webServer>
      <handlers>
          <remove name="aspNetCore" />
       </handlers>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>