When creating a new web application in SharePoint, you choose the physical location of where the IIS website will be created. Once the application is born, however, there is no longer an option to change this path in Central Administration. You can very easily change it in IIS (by going to your website’s Properties -> Home Directory -> Local Path), but once this is done, you will start running into trouble, as solution deployments will point to the web.config file at the old location.
Three quick steps need taken to successfully move the web application:
- Copy the current directory’s contents into your new directory
- Make the change to the website’s local path in IIS (as described above)
- Update the SharePoint web application to point to the new path
Note: If you have multiple servers in your farm, steps 1 and 2 will need made on each web server, but step 3 will only need done once.
The third step can be done without having to extend the site. Here are a couple options.
Option 1: C# Console Application (Reference Microsoft.SharePoint.dll)
using System; using System.IO; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration; namespace IisPath { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { try { //Open the site your web application hosts using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://yoursite.com")) { //Grab a reference to the site's web application's IIS Settings //Change SPUrlZone if application is not in default zone SPIisSettings iisSettings = site.WebApplication.IisSettings[SPUrlZone.Default]; //Point to your new path iisSettings.Path = new System.IO.DirectoryInfo(@"D:\wss\VirtualDirectories\yoursite.com"); //Call the Update method of the web application site.WebApplication.Update(); } } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); Console.ReadLine(); } } } }
Option 2: PowerShell Script
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") #Point to the site your web application hosts to grab a reference to the web application $SPSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://yoursite.com") $WebApp = $SPSite.WebApplication #Change SPUrlZone if not in default zone $IISSettings = $WebApp.IisSettings[[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUrlZone]::Default] #Point to your new directory $IISSettings.Path = "D:\wss\VirtualDirectories\yoursite.com" #Update Web Application $WebApp.Update() $SPSite.Dispose()
I hope this has been helpful, and as always, thank you for reading.
Cheers.
Horus
Anders Houlberg-Nielsen
Jean-Marie Pirelli
Shola Salako
May 8, 2009
Thanks for this helpful overview! I would like to add a comment and a question:
1) Step 2 can be a bit more complex than simply changing the local path. (See Microsoft TechNet http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/a59a2665-9078-43ef-8b5a-5bf9bcacc95e.mspx?mfr=true)
2) Since I am an administrator, not a developer, is there a way to accomplish step 3 without writing code? For example, do you if there are stsadm commands that can be used to do this?