IIS 7 deploy rewrite rules on a website

Question

I have to apply some redirect rules on IIS7/VS2008 and have question on how to deploy it. We have a website and not web application and hence most of other SO questions were not useful to me.

in order to apply rule like below in website:

<rewrite>
   <rules>
   <clear />
      <rule name="Redirect rule1 for Static404Redirects">
        <match url=".*" />
        <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">
           <add input="{Static404Redirects:{REQUEST_URI}}" pattern="(.+)" />
         </conditions>
         <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}" appendQueryString="false" />
       </rule>
    </rules>
</rewrite>

in

1. Bin folder there is no websitename.dll. just some other dlls like Ajaxtoolkit.
2. Should it have any dll/assembly/GAC being a website?
3. I can simply copy test server web.config to production w/o using any IIS UI for rules part and It should work.
4. Also will the application need to be restart from IIS after web.config change? or new change comes into affect by itself on saving web.config?

Is this correct? or will I need anything else to do? I am afraid will web.config change make any assembly changes/dll/version or any other changes that I should think of first? As I mentioned its website project and it doesnt even have VS2008 installed on Prod. Basically I want to be sure I know what am I doing.

thank you!

Answer 1

It doesn't make any difference in regards to the IIS rewrite module whether you are using a web site or a web application.

It does not affect any assemblies where-ever they may be.

You need to make sure that the rewrite module is installed on the server, otherwise changing your web.config will break the site.

You can make changes to the web.config without using the UI, the web site will be up the changes automatically.