Question

Is it possible I can use PowerShell command (e,g, New-WebSite) to create a web site and set site’s preloadEnabled=”true”?

Answer 1

I’ve been looking for this too, but couldn’t find anything in WebAdministration to set this option. Presumably the approach would be to call New-ItemProperty on the correct WebApplication. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the “default” application for a given website, or to set this property on it. It kinda seems like the WebAdministration module (which enables cmdlets like New-WebSite) was written with earlier versions of IIS in mind, and certainly before the Application Initialization module.

This is a workaround, which forces the setting of these properties by editing the underlying applicationHost.config file. This is a slightly simplified version of a script we’re now using. You’ll need to run this script as an administrator.

# Copy applicationHost.config to the temp directory,
# Edit the file using xml parsing,
# copy the file back, updating the original

$file = "applicationhost.config"
$source = Join-Path "$env:windir" "\system32\inetsrv\config\$file"
$temp = Join-Path "$env:temp" "$([Guid]::NewGuid().ToString())"
$tempFile = Join-Path "$temp" "$file"

#update all applications in websites whose name matches this search term
$search = "website name to search for"

#copy applicationHost.config to  temp directory for edits
#assignments to $null simply silence output
$null = New-Item -itemType Directory -path $temp
$null = Copy-Item "$source" "$temp"

# Load the config file for edits
[Xml]$xml = Get-Content $tempFile

# find sites matching the $search string, enable preload on all applications therein
$applications = $xml.SelectNodes("//sites/site[contains(@name, `"$search`")]/application") 
$applications | % { 
    $_.SetAttribute("preloadEnabled", "true") 
}

#save the updated xml
$xml.Save("$tempFile.warmed")

#overwrite the source with updated xml
Copy-Item "$tempfile.warmed" "$source"

#cleanup temp directory
Remove-Item -recurse $temp