Is there a way to publish a site from Visual Studio to IIS without administrator privileges?

Question

As a local developer, I would like to publish a site (via WebDeploy) from Visual Studio 2013 to IIS (localhost) without starting Visual Studio as an administrator.

Is this possible, and if so, how?

I tried Edit Permissions... for the site and granted my rights to the Modify account, but it doesn't seem to work ... or I need to install something else as well.

I experimented and tested FTP-Deploy (ftps) as well. It works without administrator rights, but has a drawback. It is really very slow (localhost!), So I consider this as a last resort. I don’t even want to think how long it works when the site grows ...

Answer 1

It does not work without running as an administrator (or with elevated privileges).

The reason is because you need elevated privileges for the C:\inetpub\ folder, which is the default folder for IIS. You can ( you shouldn't ) disable UAC, which is the original of this "problem", but this is a workaround, not a real solution.

I think creating a new website in IIS that points to a different folder (which is not protected by UAC) solves the problem for you.

Answer 2

Another task is to create a shared resource in the directory c:\inetpub\wwwroot (grant read and write permissions) and publish to share like this: \\mypc\wwwroot\mywebsite . This helped me bypass the annoying UAC security without disabling it.