glfwInit fails when launch by IIS 7

Question

I am making an app that create image from 3d scene. I use GLFW and GLEW library. I want to call this app since web service.

My app run well when I launch it with the .exe file but when it is launch by IIS7. it crash when glCreateShader is called and it seem that glfwInit fails.

I put the .dll path in environment variable.

any idea ?

Answer 1

The OpenGL implementations you can usually find on a computer assume a GPU to be available. In general network services, like web servers, are run in an environment configuration that doesn't give access to a GPU. Hence OpenGL is not available for that either.

Furthermore often for security reasons, all API functions that deal with UI elements (like Window and Device Context) creation are disabled as well.

Update:

You could drop using GLFW and use OSMesa to create a pure offscreen, windowless OpenGL context, which rasterizes using a CPU-only implementation. OSMesa has to be custom built and liked into your program, and when doing so it will not be able to fall back (effortlessly) to a GPU accelerated OpenGL implementation.