I am pleased to announce that I teamed up with Microsoft to create a greatly improved installation experience using their Web Platform Installer. Installing GSP is now as simple as clicking a few buttons and filling out a few textboxes. No more manually creating the web application or wrestling with NTFS permissions!
Plus, GSP is also being distributed by Microsoft through their Web Application Gallery. Web traffic doubled the day this went live, and it has only increased since then!
The Web Platform Installer has two requirements:
- You must have permission to run the program
- You must use SQL Server to store the data
Those of you who use hosting companies that restrict you from running applications on the server – or who want to use SQLite as your data store – should continue to use the existing installation process. Support for SQLite will be coming soon.
I will step through the installation process to show you how easy it is.
When you click the installation icon (above or on the download page), The Web Platform Installer starts. If you do not have it installed, you’ll be prompted to install it.
Gallery Server Pro is pre-selected, so click Install. The installer determines which dependencies are needed. You list could include more than shown here.
Note that the installer will want to install SQL Server Express. If you already have SQL Server available on your network, you can skip installing it by clicking the X next to it.
When you click I Accept, the installation begins.
After your requirements are installed, the installer asks where it should install Gallery Server Pro.
Then it will ask for some SQL connection info. Remember that the installer supports ONLY SQL Server. Support for SQLite will be coming soon.
The installation is finished. Woo hoo! Look Ma! No messing with IIS Manager, Network Service accounts, or NTFS!
Click the link to launch your new gallery:
Pretty sweet, huh? This is a significant step toward making GSP easier to install and use. Microsoft has been very helpful and they deserve our thanks for supporting open source projects like this. And I look forward to spending more time adding features to GSP and less time in the forums explaining how to give the Network Service account modify permission to a directory. Cheers!
