Most Important AppCmd Commands

Usually, a day doesnt go by that I dont get a collegue or a partner team in Microsoft asking how to do something or other about AppCmd.exe, the unified command line management tool for the IIS7 server.  Since its inception in the fall of 2005, the tool has been becoming increasingly popular internally – IIS7 setup code, stress and performance automation scripts, and many of Windows partner teams rely on AppCmd to perform IIS7 setup, configuration, and management tasks.  Since another IIS developer and I wrote the tool, we (or actually mostly I) constantly get bombarded by requests to give people commands to do what they want. 

For a while, I've been thinking about blogging about the most commonly used commands to assist people get going with managing IIS7 from the command line – and so the "Most Important AppCmd Commands" post series was born.

Before I jump into the first post, here are some good resources that should be your first stop whenever you need to use AppCmd:

1. AppCmd command line help. 

   The tool comes with detaled built-in help that describes every object and command supported by the tool.  When in doubt:

   AppCmd /?
   Display the objects supported by appcmd.

   AppCmd Site /?          
   Display the command supported by the "Site" object.

   AppCmd Add Site /?  
   Display the parameters and examples for using the "Add" command on the "Site" object.

2. AppCmd online guide: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=954&p=1

   This guide describes the most important parts of AppCmd, and is a good way to discover functionality as well as see examples of its usage.

Without further ado, here is the first post in this series – Backing up and restoring IIS7 configuration.