In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Wordpress on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8. Assume that you have your own dedicated server and you want to install Wordpress. If you use shared hosting provider, all can be done via one click installation via your hosting provider Control panel, or you can ask your hosting provider to install Wordpress for you. Now, how about if you own your dedicated server and you want to install Wordpress on server?

Configuration

The configuration of IIS 8 is quite easy: you just enable the Web Server role through Server Manager. Please see the screenshot below

Then, please make sure you install PHP Manager, I would recommend you to use http://phpmanager.codeplex.com/. This is good tool and help you to enable and disable PHP extensions.

Installation

To make things easy, you can install and configure PHP quite easily using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. When you run the Web Platform Installer (Web PI), you can do a quick search for “sql php” and it comes up a few results. When you select “Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP v5.4 for SQL Server in IIS”, which is what we need, all other prerequisites will be automatically installed as well as dependencies (PHP and URL Rewrite for IIS).

After Web PI finishes, you will have PHP installed and configured for use in IIS. Time to do a little test to see if everything is running smoothly. Create a new file under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ (or wherever your Default Web Site is pointing to) named test.php with the following content:

<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

This will output information about your PHP configuration (ref: http://php.net/manual/en/function.phpinfo.php).

Time to try it out: navigate to the page (likely http://localhost/test.php). If you are greeted with a screen with purple blocks of information about your PHP configuration, you’re all set and you can skip ahead to the WORDPRESS INSTALLATION section. Chances are you’re going to be greeted with an IIS 403.1 error screen, however, which is due to the fact that the user account that IIS is currently using for the anonymous access to your site doesn’t have the proper privileges to access your wwwroot (or equivalent) folder on disk. This is solved quite easily by granting this user (called IUSR by default) access to the wwwroot folder through Windows Explorer or your other favorite method.

Then, please retry

Wordpress Installation

Now we can start downloading the actual WordPress files and start the installation. First off, grab the latest version (or the version of your choice) of WordPress. We will also need the WP Db Abstraction plugin. After downloading, unblock and unZIP both files in a folder under wwwroot (or your Web Site’s location). Installation of the WP Db Abstraction plugin is quite easy, just follow the steps outlined in the readme.txt:

• Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins. This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory. If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it.
• Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php
• Visit $your_wordpress_url/wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/setup-config.php to generate your wp-config.php file

Before you perform the last step, though, go to IIS Manager and enter PHP Manager (it’s located on the Features page of your server under IIS). Scroll down and click the “Enable or disable an extension” link. You need to make sure that php_pdo_sqlsrv.dll and php_sqlsrv.dll are both enabled. You can also go ahead and disable the *mysql*.dll extensions. Here’s my list of enabled extensions:

Now we can visit the setup-config.php page as outlined above. The steps here are quite straightforward, so I’m not going to walk you through them. You will need to create a user on your SQL Server 2012 installation with SQL Server authentication that has access to a database that you also need to create to use for your WordPress installation. 

One note about this process: I had some issues when choosing the default selected “SQL Server using MS PHP driver” and went with the “PDO SqlSrv” option the second time to eliminate these issues.

If the wizard has trouble automatically creating the wp-config.php file, you can either choose to give IUSR write permissions on the folder you created to hold all your WordPress files or you can manually create the file under that folder and paste the output you see on screen in there (I chose the latter). After the wp-config.php file is created, you can start the installation of WordPress by clicking the link on the bottom of the page you’re on.

Wordpress Configuration

After the install, which should only take a minute tops, you are now ready to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and start configuring it how you’d like. As you can see, there’s a sample post and comment already waiting for you. If your experience is anything like mine, you will notice that when you navigate to the Posts -> All Posts option on the top left of your dashboard you won’t actually see these posts in the list. It took some hunting around the web to figure this out, but apparently there’s a line in the translations.php file of the WP Db Abstraction plugin that’s causing this (thanks to tm3ister on http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp-sqlsrv/forums/forum/1124403/topic/5004241 for figuring this out!). The solution is to manually edit the translate_limit function in the mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/translations/sqlsrv/translations.php file:

Change

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) == 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

To

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) >= 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

The last thing we’re going to configure is Permalinks (or pretty URLs) for our posts. When you navigate to Settings -> Permalinks on the admin dashboard, you’ll see some options to rewrite URLs to be more human and search engine friendly. For now, select Custom Structure and enter/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ in the text field and hit Save Changes. The last step is to create a web.config file in our WordPress folder to rewrite the URLs according to this scheme with IIS URL Rewrite. Create a new web.config file (if you don’t have one already) in the folder you installed WordPress to and copy in the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard">
          <match url="*" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"/>
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Done!! Your Wordpress is ready on Windows Server 2012.

Prerequisite

If you are using SSL on your IIS 8.5 (from 7.5 or greater) server for some time now; to get here you had to do a few things:

1. You scrubbed your site content to ensure all URLs are using their relative form, e.g. “src=’//images\image.png” or explicitly reference the use of HTTPS.
2. You have tested for certificate and SSL related problems like mixed content, appropriately tagging cookies as secure.
3. You have ensured that you follow the best practices guidance for SSL server configuration and verified you get an A on  SSLLabs.

there are a few things left for you to do, the most obvious being redirecting all traffic to the SSL version of your site! You should probably monitor your CPU usage during your peak so to ensure you have some headroom. This isn’t likely to be a problem as most web-servers are not CPU bound but it’s always good to check.

Once you know you are OK then it’s just a matter of deciding which approach to use, you have two choices:

1. Dynamically rewriting via code in your ASPX pages
2. Using the IIS URL Rewrite  module

If you are familiar with the IIS configuration you’re probably asking yourself what about the “Require secure channel (SSL)” option in the IIS MMC? Unfortunately this doesn’t do redirecting it only requires the use of SSL on a given site/folder/file.

So how do you decide which approach to use? The answer to that question is dependent on both your environment and personal preference, but this time we will show how to do using the method two

IIS URL Rewrite Module

since in this article we will showed you to use the second choice, using the IIS URL Rewrite module, you can check the steps below

This approach has a number of benefits, for one having this module allows you to leverage remapping for other purposes also for example maintaining old links that have SEO value. From a security standpoint it’s also a good approach as it keeps this decision one of policy that is enforced in a central place.

To use the URL rewrite approach you will need to do the following:

1. Install the URL Rewrite module (x86, x64).
2. Add a rule to rewrite all HTTP URLs to HTTPS.
   1. Open your “web.config” with your favorite editor.
   2. Find the “configuration\system.webserver\rewrite\rules” section.
   3. Add the following text block:
      <rule name=”Redirect to HTTPS” stopProcessing=”true”>
      <match url=”(.*)” />
      <conditions>
      <add input=”{HTTPS}” pattern=”^OFF$” />
      </conditions>
      <action type=”Redirect” url=”https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}” redirectType=”Permanent” />
      </rule>
3. Restart IIS
   

Now you can go to your website over HTTP and you will see you are redirected to the HTTPS instance of the site.