Question

Is there a way to give an ASP.NET MVC 4 project a “public” folder, which would act like the application root, like in Ruby on Rails?

ASP.NET MVC usually comes with a “Content” folder where you can put statically served files like style sheets, scripts, and images. But the URLs for these files have to include the Content folder, for example <img src="/Content/logo.png">.Is it possible to make the Content folder the root of the application so you can use this instead: <img src="/logo.png">?

Answer 1

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this before, but I was able to accomplish this with IIS URL Rewrite. The following rules assume a folder named “Public” where your static files reside. Of course, you can name the folder whatever you want.

<!-- Any direct references to files in the Public folder should be
     301 redirected to maintain canonical URLs. This is optional. -->
<rule name="Public folder canonical path" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="^public/(.*)" />
  <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
  <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}" appendQueryString="true" />
</rule>

<!-- Any URL that points to an existing file after prepending "Public" to it
     will serve that file. For example, if a file exists at /Public/style.css
     then the URL /style.css will serve that file. Likewise, if a file exists
     at /Public/images/logo.png, then the URL /images/logo.png will serve
     that file. Files in the Public folder will take precedence over files in
     the application root, so if a file /Public/script.js exists and a file
     /script.js exists, only the /Public/script.js file will be served. This
     also takes precedence over MVC routes. -->
<rule name="Public folder" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url=".+" />
  <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">
    <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/Public/" negate="true" />
    <add input="{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/Public{URL}" matchType="IsFile" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Rewrite" url="Public/{R:0}" appendQueryString="true" />
</rule>