Should ProcessWire support IIS out of the box?

[Joss]

Not being a user of IIS, I really do not know the answer to this.

But it did come up last week where it looked like I would have to use an IIS server. That problem has gone away, but I am wondering whether this should be catered for automatically so it is as quick and easy to load on IIS as it is on Apache, without having to dig through tutorials.

Obviously, there are some requirements that have to be met - php, mysql, url rewrite.

When trying to install IIS on my local machine (not as easy as I thought!) I noticed that in the Web Installer wizard, Wordpress and Joomla are both listed as ready to go.

Anyway, any thoughts?

[Mike Rockett]

I guess it should support it by default - but, then again, I don't know many people who specifically need IIS. That's really for Microsoft products...

Howcome installing IIS wasn't as easy as you thought?

[teppo]

I guess it should support it by default - but, then again, I don't know many people who specifically need IIS.

Exactly. It would be nice to know a) how big the need really is, and b) how much work is needed to add and maintain this. I don't have anything against IIS, but it's also very unlikely that I'll ever need it either. We've already got native support for Apache, and personally I'd like to see native support for nginx too. On my list that's much higher than IIS.

.. although I did specifically make the Changelog module IIS compatible, so who am I to speak

[Joss]

It is a side I know very little about, to be honest.

But looking at article like this: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/04/02/april-2014-web-server-survey.html

It seems there are a lot of sites using IIS out there.

Certainly, as I mentioned, the web installer that is commonly used to manage IIS installations has a plethora of well known PHP applications ready to install - click the button and they install all the dependencies as well, including IIS itself. That makes it attractive to some, I would think.

The web host I thought I was going to be forced to use does not use linux or apache at all on any of their solutions. I think the reason is that their complete service includes things like Exchange server and other MS products offerings, so they are very much a MS shop. But he did tell me that 50% of client websites are Wordpress on IIS.

I don't think this is some big market opportunity for PW at all, but I do wonder whether it is something that should be catered for anyway.

As I said, I am no expert, so I do not have a definitive answer.

[Joss]

Howcome installing IIS wasn't as easy as you thought?

Well, initially it seemed to be fine. Then various bits kept hanging during installation (esp MySQL) and then when I did manage to get most of it sorted, I could not get it to connect to MySQL properly, so I ground to a halt. Then the client said he had not actually ordered the server yet, so the problem went away. 

I was grateful as anything, as my main system needs to be kept primarily for audio production and I do not like adding too many background services.

[mrjasongorman]

I've worked with IIS and NGINX using Processwire, we have sites running on both just fine.

http://dsq.uk (NGINX) and http://globalstandard.cips.org (IIS)

Same process for both really, install MYSQL, and some form of PHP engine (PHP-FPM or HHVM), then get the rewrite to route urls to yourdomain.com/?it=$request_uri

You can install PHP5 and MYSQL using the IIS application installer pretty easy.

Hope this helps

[mrjasongorman]

I guess it should support it by default - but, then again, I don't know many people who specifically need IIS. That's really for Microsoft products...

Howcome installing IIS wasn't as easy as you thought?

As for IIS, many larger companies do ask for it, especially with their IT teams being "Microsoft Certified". Thankfully, newer versions of IIS are a lot more friendly with websites not built on ASP.NET. Personally i'd prefer to use NGINX with HHVM (php engine created by Facebook), as performance is insane.

[apeisa]

Jason, have you tried pw with HHVM?

[teppo]

Regarding HHVM, this could be of interest: https://processwire.com/talk/topic/5226-does-processwire-work-with-the-hiphop-virtual-machine-hhvm/ 

[mrjasongorman]

Hey guys, not specifically with HHVM, but i have wordpress running fine on HHVM, so i guess processwire should be ok, nice link Teppo!

[mrjasongorman]

Ok, i can confirm that ProcessWire does work on NGINX and HHVM (no traditional caching being used atm), normal page load times are around 1.5 seconds according to Chromes network inspector.

Setup is as follows: install NGINX as normal, and HHVM from hhvm.com

I've edited the /etc/hhvm/server.ini file to make HHVM run on port 9001 so i can run it along side PHP-FPM on port 9000

HHVM will create a hhvm.conf file in your NGINX directory.

edit this conf to point hhvm's relevant port number.

location ~ \.(hh|php)$ {
    fastcgi_keep_conn on;
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9001;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

Then in your NGINX sites-available edit the file to route URLS to ?it=

location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?it=$uri&$args;
        }

Then include the hhvm.conf to handle the PHP processing.

include hhvm.conf;

Restart both HHVM and NGINX and it should be running just fine, with the option to switch back to PHP-FPM if needed.

Hope this helps, setup seems to be pretty quick!

[qtguru]

No worries got a new project for a Polo Club about to show them the power of content management, I wrote the previous in Yii Framework 1 and it runs on IIS without any issues so am going to test PW3 on it and give feedback.