IISExpress returns a 503 error from remote machines

After wasting more than 3h on such a full subject I decided to share my setup with you. My configuration is Visual Express 2012 for Web update 4 on windows 8. This was my first come back to MS VS since studies (at least 8 years) and now I'm sure that linux rules. On django this kind of setup took me 10min of searching documentation.

1. turn off firewall for testing

   netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off
   

2. setup bindings in my case local address is localIP=192.168.1.102 (because links can not contain nonnumeric domain, use it below instead of mylocaldomain.com, see stackoverflow policy) in Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

   <bindings>
       <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:53351:mylocaldomain.com" />
       <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:53351:localhost" />
   </bindings>
   

3. add autorun for ISS Express start service automatically

   <site name="NeuronCharts" id="2" serverAutoStart="true">
   

4. Add some weird rules to http server (I still do not know if this is nesseary)

   netsh http add urlacl url=http://mylocaldomain.com:53351/ user=everyone
   

5. run IISExpress manually not from VS IDE

6. you will see that ISSExpress is registering bindings
7. run browser http://mylocaldomain.com:53351 if it is working then we can add firewall rule

8. add firewall rule

   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="IISExpressWeb" dir=in protocol=tcp localport=53351 remoteip=any action=allow
   

set remoteip to any if you want to access you server from outside world if you want to access for local network use localsubnet

8. start firewall

   netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state on
   

9. check again if everything is working on local and public ip

Wish you luck

Rafal

There was only 1 thing that worked for me.

using *:portnumber:* was no good. Yes, after doing that and making sure the Windows Firewall was open, I could connect to the port, but I still got the "503" error.

I tested a few things locally, and discovered that only http://localhost worked. Using the real IP address (not 127.0.0.1, but, for instance, 192.168.1.50), still returned a 503 even on the local machine. I tried using the real host name in the bindings, but IIS Express refused to start. This may actually have something to do with how the host name was being resolved. I didn't explore that further.

Finally, I ended up using this configuration:

<binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:53351:localhost" />
<binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="192.168.1.50:53351:*" />

In that way, I was able to connect from a remote machine using http://192.168.1.50:53351.

It looks like you are missing a binding information entry in applicationhost.config file.

1. Open your applicationhost.config file. Possible locations are:

   • %userprofile%\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config
   • $(solutionDir)\.vs\config\applicationhost.config (VS2015)
   • Failing that, inspect the output from iisexpress.exe to be sure.

2. Locate your WebSite entry and add following binding with your machine name.

        <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation=":50333:your-machine-name" />
   

3. Restart IIS Express

Found the problem had to do with a bad urlacl mapping. To figure this out:

netsh http show urlacl 

and look for things like http://+:80/ or the port you are binding to.

Then use

netsh http delete url=<the url from the list>

This fixed the problem for me.