ASP.Net Core 1.0 RC2 : What are LAUNCHER_PATH and LAUNCHER_ARGS mentioned in web.config?

Question

There are breaking changes in ASP.NET 5 RC2 release:

• It is rebranded to ASP.NET Core 1.0 (ASP.NET 5 is dead)
• Good bye dnvm and dnu<

Answer 1

This is part of web.config in VS:

<aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%"
    stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout"
    forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

And this is on the server after publishing:

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\AppName.dll" 
    stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" 
    forwardWindowsAuthToken="false" />

In this example %LAUNCHER_PATH% was replaced by dotnet, and %LAUNCHER_ARGS% by application name with .dll extension

Answer 2

The %LAUNCHER_PATH% and %LAUNCHER_ARGS% are used by VS. publish-iis tool (if configured) will override them when you publish your application.

Answer 3

From github IISSample (thank you @Pawel and Luke), here are the value possibilities:

<!-- This set of attributes are used for launching the sample using IISExpress via Visual Studio tooling -->
<aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

<!-- This set of attributes are used for launching the sample for full CLR (net451) without Visual Studio tooling -->
<aspNetCore processPath=".\IISSample.exe" arguments="" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

<!-- This set of attributes are used for launching the sample for Core CLR (netcoreapp1.0) without Visual Studio tooling -->
<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\IISSample.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

After several hours dealing with them, I found there are two web.configs that we need to deal with: src\ProjectName\wwwroot\web.config and src\ProjectName\web.config . If you dont have the latter, VS2015 publish will generate one for you with %LAUNCHER_PATH% and %LAUNCHER_ARGS% by default.

To have the project run and debuggable locally under VS2015 via IISExpress, both web.config need to have the default value below. Replacing LAUNCHER_PATH and LAUNCHER_ARGS to something else causes VS2015 to hang indefinitely.

<aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

However, upon deploying to IIS (I am using 8.5 on WinServer 2012 R2), the value on src\ProjectName\web.config must be replaced with the following. If configured, the dotnet publish-iis command suppose to do the replacement for you (see below).

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\ProjectName.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>

If you are migrating from RC1, change the http bound directory as well to Project root folder, not wwwroot. Example: from C:\inetpub\ProjectName\wwwroot to C:\inetpub\ProjectName.

To configure publish-iis to do automatic replacement, add this snippet to your project.json: (Thank you @Pawel)

  "tools": {
    "Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IISIntegration.Tools": {
      "version": "1.0.0-preview1-final"
    }
  },
  "scripts": {
    "postpublish": "dotnet publish-iis --publish-folder %publish:OutputPath% --framework %publish:FullTargetFramework%"
  }

The IISIntegration tool segment converts these Launcher variables to the appropriate deployment values. Without it, you will get the following error:

No executable found matching command "dotnet-publish-iis"

I am using RC2 Toolkit Preview 1.

Answer 4

Thanks for the help guys, I was using a template (https://github.com/MarkPieszak/aspnetcore-angular2-universal) and the command

dotnet publish

made a folder under

bin/Debug/netcoreapp1.1/publish

Setting this path as the root directory of the site made it work!