A month ago, I created an Azure hosted Wordpress site. Being a WordPress/PHP novice, I spent a lot of time to determine how my best option forward would be to make a local copy of what I already created on my Azure hosted site, and then fully evolve the site on my Windows 8 workstation.
It took me even more time to learn how WebMatrix is far superior tool to get a local copy from Azure to any WordPress Plugins of MySQL server related tools - because WebMatrix is a completely aware of Windows environment. As I am not sure that I use WebMatrix in optimal fashion, I would hope that someone can set me straight. Here is what I did:
- Installed WebMatrix on my Windows 8 workstation.
- Since I am not sure whether WebMatrix' is aware of most current MySQL version, I installed MySQL 5.5 before using WebMatrix to download my Azure hosted site.
- Started WebMatrix and pointed it to my Azure hosted WordPress. Used this site's publishing profile to define the WebMatrix connection to my site and clicked on WebMatrix Download button. WebMatrix fetched the WordPress site files and the database and I was given the URL as http://localhost:34987 . When clicked, I got my Azure hosted site shown as hosted locally.
- Using MySQL Workbench, I could verify that there is a copy of the remote database, carrying the same name as original augmented by a three letter suffix.
Issue 1: while I could see where the site files are located (C:\Users\Fred\Documents\My Web Sites\WordPress1 - note that the site name also got changed in the process by adding suffix "1"), I do not know what entity hosts this site - Windows 8 IIS does not seem aware of this site and I do not have Apache installed.
The answer to this question is relevant to me because when I repeated the same set of steps on Windows 2008 Server, trying to run the site (again ashttp://localhost:xxxx) I get the error: HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden -- issued by IIS 8 Express, which clearly got installed as a part of WebMatrix installation. If this error was issued by IIS 7, I would fix it right away, of course.
Issue 2: How can I run IIS 8 on Windows 2008 server to fix the problem created by WebMatrix download of a remote Azure hosted site?
Note: my final plan is to get a copy of my Azure hosted site to my workstation, and then practice uploads of that same local site to my Windows 2008 server, so I do not destroy the Azure hosted site, while practicing uploads. As you see, I failed to even download the remote site to 2008 Server, which clearly behaves differently than my Windows 8 workstation.