Using an IIS Virtual Directory or Nested Application via appSettings

suggest change

Using a Virtual Directory or Nested Application in IIS is a common scenario and most likely one that you’ll want to take advantage of when using IISNode.

IISNode doesn’t provide direct support for Virtual Directories or Nested Applications via configuration so to achieve this we’ll need to take advantage of a feature of IISNode that isn’t part of the configuration and is much lesser known. All children of the <appSettings> element with the Web.config are added to the process.env object as properties using the appSetting key.

Lets create a Virtual Directory in our <appSettings>

<appSettings>
  <add key="virtualDirPath" value="/foo" />
</appSettings>

Within our Node.js App we can access the virtualDirPath setting

console.log(process.env.virtualDirPath); // prints /foo

Now that we can use the <appSettings> element for configuration, lets take advantage of that and use it in our server code.

// Access the virtualDirPath appSettings and give it a default value of '/'
// in the event that it doesn't exist or isn't set
var virtualDirPath = process.env.virtualDirPath || '/';

// We also want to make sure that our virtualDirPath 
// always starts with a forward slash
if (!virtualDirPath.startsWith('/', 0))
  virtualDirPath = '/' + virtualDirPath;

// Setup a route at the index of our app    
server.get(virtualDirPath, (req, res) => {
    return res.status(200).send('Hello World');
});

We can use the virtualDirPath with our static resources as well

// Public Directory
server.use(express.static(path.join(virtualDirPath, 'public')));
// Bower
server.use('/bower_components', express.static(path.join(virtualDirPath, 'bower_components')));

Lets put all of that together

const express = require('express');
const server = express();

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;

// Access the virtualDirPath appSettings and give it a default value of '/'
// in the event that it doesn't exist or isn't set
var virtualDirPath = process.env.virtualDirPath || '/';

// We also want to make sure that our virtualDirPath 
// always starts with a forward slash
if (!virtualDirPath.startsWith('/', 0))
  virtualDirPath = '/' + virtualDirPath;

// Public Directory
server.use(express.static(path.join(virtualDirPath, 'public')));
// Bower
server.use('/bower_components', express.static(path.join(virtualDirPath, 'bower_components')));

// Setup a route at the index of our app    
server.get(virtualDirPath, (req, res) => {
    return res.status(200).send('Hello World');
});

server.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Listening on ${port}`);
});

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:



Table Of Contents