Table of contents for Installing WordPress On IIS From the Ground Up

  1. Installing MySQL on Windows
  2. Installing FastCGI on IIS6
  3. Installing PHP on Windows and IIS
  4. Installing phpMyAdmin on Windows and IIS 6.0
  5. Preparing to Install WordPress on Windows and IIS
  6. Installing WordPress (Single-User)
  7. Troubleshooting on IIS7


I’ve been setting up WordPress on Windows Server 2008 R2 lately and as part of trying to understand the issues fully - by installing, uninstalling, installing, etc., the last time through I forgot to create the database and the SQL user for WordPress. Unfortunately, when I connected to my website, all I got was the following error page:

Internal_Server_ErrorNo matter how I modified my WordPress configuration file, I couldn’t get anything more to be displayed, and none of the log files (PHP or IIS) contained any additional information.  Turns out this is a security feature of IIS7 to prevent details of the web server (such as folder locations, etc.) from being displayed publicly.  The solution is simple, if somewhat obscure.

To get IIS to display more detailed information, you must run the Configuration and change a setting.  Here are the steps:

  1. From Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (hereafter called IIS Manager), click on the website you are having trouble with in the tree view to the left.  If you click on the server, your changes will apply to all websites.
  2. In the Management section, double-click on Configuration Editor.
  3. In the dropdown list next to the Section label, select system.webServer –> httpErrors.
  4. Change the errorMode to Detailed.

It’s likely that the value of errorMode is set to DetailedLocalOnly, but this value doesn’t help for troubleshooting a WordPress site since IIS won’t consider your access local even if you access it from the machine running IIS.  Too bad really, since after you are done with your troubleshooting you will want to reset the value back to DetailedLocalOnly.

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