Internet Information Services

Internet Information Services (IIS) is the web server software bundled with Windows Server, as well as certain client versions of Windows. Please note Apache web server has much better community support and there are usually fewer problems when running LMS on Apache. Windows OS is not suitable for large installations because PHP is limited to 32bit even in 64bit Windows, please consider using Linux or other unix-like operating systems instead.

IIS installation steps (Windows 7)

1. Go to Control panel, click on Programs and Turn Windows features on or off
2. Tick “Internet Information Services” and “Internet Information Services / Application Development Features / CGI”
3. Install Microsoft Web Platform Installer

PHP installation steps

It is strongly recommended to use only the official MS Platform installer, it automatically installs all necessary components and facilitates easy configuration with PHP manager. Manual installation attempts often fail or may not allow LMS to function properly. Unfortunately, MS does not usually distribute an up-to-date version of PHP, you may need to download them manually.

1. Install Microsoft Web Platform Installer
2. Install latest PHP 5.5.x using Web Platform Installer
3. Install URL Rewrite 2.0 using Web Platform Installer

Optionally you may install the required components manually:

1. Download PHP manager for IIS and install it
2. Download latest PHP 5.5.x VC11 x86 Non Thread Safe from http://windows.php.net/download/
3. Extract the Zip file to a directory such as C: PHP
4. Install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 [1] – on 64bit Windows install both x86 and x64
5. Open the Internet Information Service (IIS) Manager – right click on This computer and select Manage
6. Click on PHP Manager icon
7. Register new PHP version – select C:PHPphp-cgi.exe

Warning: PHP needs to be configured via FastCGI in IIS, older CGI interface is known to have problems with some file names.

PHP configuration steps

1. Set PHP configuration to values recommended by PHP Manager
2. Enable required extensions in the PHP manager: php_intl.dll, php_pgsql.dll
3. Enable OPcache extension
4. Set your timezone in PHP.ini
5. Set appropriate memory limits in PHP.ini

IIS configuration steps

1. Setup URL rewriting described below
2. Configure IIS to show detailed error pages.
3. Set very long CGI timeout – 1 hour or better more.
4. In IIS Manager add LMS dirroot directory as a new virtual directory or set it as the site directory

Slasharguments

The function slash arguments are required for various features in LMS to work correctly, as described in Using slash arguments.

IIS 7 should support relative path arguments by default. If it does not work try enabling the following in php.ini

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

URL rewriting

If you can not modify the registry as described below you may try manual configuration of rewrite rules, the PHP installation via Microsoft Web Platform Installer installs necessary URL Rewrite 2.0 module.

Add following rewrite rule to enable support for unicode filenames in LMS and to work around internal file length limitation breaking YUI file serving:

• Matches the Pattern – Regular Expressions –

  ^([^?]+?.php)(/.+)$

• Action – Rewrite –

  {R:1}?file={R:2}

• Append query string – enabled
• Stop processing of subsequent rules – enabled

Optional UTF-8 filename fix

By default, IIS is unable to handle unicode characters in files uploaded into LMS. This may result in not working Javascript on LMS site (impossible to expand navigation, etc.) or broken CSS styles.

Execute:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesw3svcParameters /v FastCGIUtf8ServerVariables /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d REQUEST_URIPATH_INFO

CGI timeouts

By default IIS is configured to stop the execution of any PHP script after 5 minutes of activity, this interferes with long-running LMS scripts such as upgrade or cron. The timeout should be increased to at least one hour.

Directory permissions

The default IIS account is IIS_IUSRS, make sure it has appropriate access right to LMS dirroot (read-only) and dataroot (read/write) directories.

Debugging problems

By default, IIS uses custom error pages that intentionally hide error details on production sites:

But when you’re diagnosing problems in LMS that’s not very useful. You can temporarily disable these default error messages in IIS so that you see a specific LMS error message. To achieve that set the “existingResponse” setting for Custom Error Pages in IIS to “PassThrough” for your LMS site. The result will be that LMS displays a more specific message about the error when a problem occurs:

The generic IIS “404” error message which normally does not reveal any details about the problem will no longer be displayed.

The debugging option in Settings>Site administration>Development>Debugging should also be enabled so that you see the debug messages.