How can I programmatically stop or start a website in IIS (6.0 and 7.0) using MsBuild?

Question

I have Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6.0) and Windows Server 2008 (IIS 7.0) servers, and I use MSBuild for deploying web applications.

I need to do a safe deploy, and do

Answer 1

By adding a reference to Microsoft.Web.Administration (which can be found inX:\Windows\System32\inetsrv, or your systems equivalent) you can achieve nice managed control of the situation with IIS7, as sampled below:

namespace StackOverflow
{
    using System;
    using System.Linq;
    using Microsoft.Web.Administration;

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var server = new ServerManager();
            var site = server.Sites.FirstOrDefault(s => s.Name == "Default Web Site");
            if (site != null)
            {
                //stop the site...
                site.Stop();
                if (site.State == ObjectState.Stopped)
                {
                    //do deployment tasks...
                }
                else
                {
                    throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not stop website!");
                }
                //restart the site...
                site.Start();
            }
            else
            {
                throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find website!");
            }
        }
    }
}

Obviously tailor this to your own requirements and through your deployment build script execute the resulting application.

Enjoy. :)

Answer 2

• Write a script, e.g. PowerShell, which will stop/start IIS web site programmatically relying on command-line argument, e.g. start-stop.ps1 /stop 1

• Put it into MsBuild script as a custom step

---

Check this to find out how to restart IIS AppPool

IIS WMI objects reference

Answer 3

So you have your answer above for IIS7. What you're missing is IIS6. So here you go. This is using a COM interop object as that's all that is available for IIS 6. Also, because it's in vb, you'll have to figure out how to convert it. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16686/A-C-alternative-for-the-Visual-Basic-GetObject-fun should get you on the right track. you could also create a vb project just for this code but that's kind of silly.

Dim WebServiceObj As Object
dim IisSiteId as Integer = 0
WebServiceObj = GetObject("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/" & IisSiteId)
WebServiceObj.Stop()
WebServiceObj.Start()