Fossil

Serving via IIS
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IIS offers several different ways of running Fossil, more than we cover here. This document gives only the most widely useful options, in order of complexity.

CGI

TODO

SCGI

TODO

HTTP

The following assumes you have the Fossil HTTP server running in the background, serving some local repository, bound to localhost on a fixed high-numbered TCP port. The following command in cmd.exe or PowerShell will do that:

    fossil serve --port 9000 --localhost repo.fossil

That command assumes you’ve got fossil.exe in your %PATH% and you’re in a directory holding repo.fossil. See the platform-independent instructions for further details.

The stock IIS setup doesn’t have reverse proxying features, but they’re easily added through extensions. You will need to install the Application Request Routing and URL Rewrite extensions. In my testing here, URL Rewrite showed up immediately after installing it, but I had to reboot the server to get ARR to show up. (Yay Windows.)

In IIS Manager:

  1. Double-click the “Application Request Routing Cache” icon.

  2. Right-click in the window that results, and select “Server Proxy Settings...”

  3. Check the “Enable Proxy” box in the dialog. Click the “Apply” text in the right-side pane.

  4. Return to the top server-level configuration area of IIS Manager and double-click the “URL Rewrite” icon. Alternately, you might find “URL Rewrite” in the right-side pane from within the ARR settings.

  5. Right click in the window that results and click “Add Rule(s)...” Tell it you want a “Blank rule” under “Inbound rules”.

  6. In the dialog that results, create a new rule called “Fossil repo proxy.” Set the “Pattern” to “^(.*)$” and “Rewrite URL” set to “http://localhost:9000/{R:1}”. That tells it to take everything in the path part of the URL and send it down to localhost:9000, where fossil server is listening.

  7. Click “Apply” in the right-side pane, then get back to the top level configuration for the server and click “Restart” in that same pane.

At this point, if you go to http://localhost/ in your browser, you should see your Fossil repository’s web interface instead of the default IIS web site, as before you did all of the above.

This is a very simple configuration. You can do more complicated and interesting things with this, such as redirecting only /code URLs to Fossil, letting everything else go to IIS for normal web serving. You could set up a mixed static and ASP.NET site on the rest of the URL space, with Fossil serving only that one part. See the documentation on URL Rewrite rules for more ideas.

Enabling TLS

Once you have one of the above options enabled, you might then want to use IIS as an HTTPS proxy layer. For now, we’ll just send you to the docs for that.