Laravel 5 on IIS7 does not work with web.config

Question

I have a simple Laravel 5 app. It was developed on Xampp, and worked perfectly. I copied it onto the production server, and it does not work. Something is wrong with the web.config file, because if I remove it, then the app works perfectly with index.php/path

My webconfig is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Rule 1" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="^(.*)/$" ignoreCase="false" />
          <action type="Redirect" redirectType="Permanent" url="/{R:1}" />
        </rule>
        <rule name="Rule 2" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="^" ignoreCase="false" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
</system.webServer>

The app is located at a subfolder of the website and I cannot create a new site, but I can restart IIS as needed. I really don't know IIS very well (in fact I hate it), so I don't know where to check, but since the app works without the web.config, I assume it must be the culprit.

Answer 1

IIS Needs to have the URL Rewrite Module for the Laravel web.config to work.

On XAMPP, it will work out of the box as the Apache mod_rewrite module is included and most of the configuration settings are already provided by XAMPP.

Microsoft URL Rewrite. Download it from here