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I've always found it interesting that of the major Web servers IIS is the only one with a programmatic configuration API.
by kogir 13y ago
I've always found it interesting that of the major Web servers IIS is the only one with a programmatic configuration API.
- eblume 13y agoI have never configured an IIS server. Do you find that the programmatic configuration API is helpful? I rarely find httpd.conf or nginx.conf to be difficult to manage, but it's possible that we're missing out on a good thing in the OSS world. It's been known to happen.
- sjwright 13y agoI built a system that generated IIS configuration XML files, and a script to apply/import them on any/all servers in an array. It worked, and was substantially better than using the supplied GUI, but still inferior to editing nginx conf files by hand. These days I wouldn't touch IIS with a [very long object].
- philliphaydon 13y agoIIS 7.5 / 8 is pretty good. Some cool features in 8. Anything below 7.5 I hope I never have to touch again...
- stephengillie 13y agoInstead of killing worker processes that exceed the CPU throttle, like in IIS 7, those processes are simply throttled in IIS 8.
- jl6 13y agoDoes a shell/python script that writes a httpd.conf file count as a configuration API?
- stephengillie 13y agoI think so...IIS 8 can be auto-configured in several scripting languages, including powershell, c#, etc.
- TallGuyShort 13y agoHave you looked at Auegas? I've used it quite a lot from within puppet to make well-structured changes to Apache config files.
- brokenparser 13y agoThat's Augeas. ( http://augeas.net/ http://augeas.net/ ) It takes some getting used to (some files are much easier to manage with plain old sed), but it's quite a cool and useful tool. Puppet and Kickstart are good use cases.
- beachstartup 13y agogenerating and modifying unix config files programmatically has been happening for nearly half a century the only reason a web daemon has an API in windows is because the windows registry is opaque, error-prone and in general, a giant piece of shit.
- Osiris 13y agoIIS configurations are stored in web.config and other XML files that are easily editable.
- nahname 13y agoNothing easy about editing a couple thousand line xml file. Especially when it's on the server and you have to do it with notepad.
- nawitus 13y agoWhich is why IIS has a GUI tool to do it, and with .NET you can edit the configuration with a few lines of code.
- GFischer 13y agoIt being on the server precludes opening an IDE? That said, I agree that it would be better if it isn't a thousand lines, and maybe there are better options than XML. The company I work for is a Microsoft shop (for now, switching to Java sadly), and I've edited a lot of web.configs in servers, sometimes using Notepad, and it wasn't much of a hassle (though I did have to research what to edit beforehand in some cases).
- thirsteh 13y agoYou have IDEs installed on your production servers...?
- Osiris 13y agoMy comment was refuting the parent's comment that IIS needed a GUI because it used the Windows Registry to store configuration information.
- bdcravens 13y agoSimple text parsing + service restart obviates the need for an API. The shell is your API.
- icebraining 13y agoI use jinja templates to generate nginx config files. I don't need yet another proprietary API with its own quirks and interoperability problems.
- kalininalex 13y agoI think it reflects the general Microsoft philosophy of having APIs for everything. After all, they are an API company. It shows in the PowerShell design with it's object API approach. Also, with the API you should be able to configure IIS without restarting it, while changing web.config recycles web apps (in ASP.NET scenario). With load-balancing, however, this is less of an issue.