IIS Express Launch Script

Usually during web development you want to run your web code locally via a local development web server and there are many options for this. In fact most development workflows provide this functionality. For example Visual Studio provides a local web server to run your code, and React/Webpack toolchains usually use NodeJS based solutions. Sometimes though you want to want to fire up something simple to run your code outside your development workflow.

Photo by Aryan Dhiman on Unsplash

The Problem

When developing ReactJS projects I often prefer to run my transpiled bundled code (produced via ‘NPM run build’) in a different way to my development code on a different local web server and, as I usually have IIS Express installed already, I prefer to use that than install new global Node based web server tools. Whilst the command line parameters for IIS Express are simple I have added them to this post to prevent me having to remember them in the future :)

The Solution

To run IIS Express from the commandline use:

iisexpress /path:

You can also specify a port number and other options if you require (see the documentation here).

I prefer to wrap this into a RunOutputBuild.cmd batch file that I can store with the code in the repo and fire up when I want to host my transpiled build output files.

REM Script to launch IIS Express and host the build folder
echo "Launching IIS Express"
cmd /K "c:\program files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" /path:%~dp0build

This assumes the IIS Express installation location is the default one and that the script lives in root of the repo as does the \build folder. The useful %~dp0 key resolves to the local directory where the command script was run from.

I can then just run the command file and browse to the compiled site. Its also possible to add compilation steps and one to fire up the browser automatically if required. Alternatively you could write an NPM Script or Gulp/Grunt step that replicates this functionality to launch IIS Express.