Automatically deploying IIS web apps

We've been working on automated builds and deploys at work. All of our web apps run on IIS and configuring 'good' automated deploys for these applications has been challenging. But I think we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now.

Microsoft provides a good number of support scripts (in vbs) to configure IIS, App Pools, and Virtual Directories from the command line. Some of them come with the IIS installation, some of them we had to download - if I remember correctly.

There are two 'sets' of these CLI vbs scripts that I'm aware of that work with IIS. One is found in the ../inetpub/adminscript folder. There's a bunch of vbs scripts in there. The other set is found in c:/windows/system32/iis*

Here's some examples of what you can do with these scripts:

• create a virtual directory: cscript c:\windows\system32\iisvdir.vbs /create webSiteName virDirName virDirPath /s serverName
• set perms on a virtual directory: c:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET w3svc/webSiteNumber/Root/virDirName/AccessFlags permNum (like 513)
• set ASP.NET version for the virtual Directory c:\windows\Microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -s w3svc/webSiteNumber/root/virDirName
• and tons more...
  

You can view all the website numbers in the IIS manager. They show up in a column.