Most Microsoft IIS administrators face numerous repetitive tasks: Creating sites, creating virtual directories, searching for a particular setting, determining security compliance—to name just a few. Using GUIs to complete these tasks over and over is tedious and time-consuming. Scripting such tasks is a faster and more powerful method, and IIS provides many easy-to-learn scripting interfaces. By customizing the scripts that accompany this article, you can retrieve, create, and modify IIS configuration data. The sample scripts use Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) and JScript and work on IIS 4.0 and later. Of course, you must run all these administrative scripts under the security context of a user who has administrative rights on the target machine.
Your First Script
Your first task in learning IIS administrative scripting is to configure your server so that your scripts' results will be output as text in the command-shell window rather than as graphical message boxes. To do so, open a command shell on the IIS server and type
cscript //H:cscript
To test this configuration, let's create a simple JScript script that returns the path to your default Web site. Open Notepad or another text editor and enter the following code on one line:
WScript.Echo ("Physical path of my
default web-site: " + GetObject
("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1/ROOT").Path);
Save the file as iispath.js. Go back to the command shell and type
iispath.js
This command runs the script. If you configured the server properly, you'll see output similar to the output that Figure 1, page 56, shows. This output shows the physical path of your default IIS Web site. Congratulations—you've written your first IIS script. Now, let's move on to bigger and better things.