How browsers find applicationHost.config file?

Question

I was trying to change the name of web.config and read some Q/A about it where the final solution was to reference from web.config to an extra config file using configSource .

I wonder how browsers know that there is config file in c:\\programfiles\\system32\\....\\ applicationHost.config when they want to connect to localhost? In other words how IIS notifies the browsers to look for this file rather than the web.congif itself? There is no reference to this file in web.config in the root of wwwroot.

Answer 1

You can't change the name, it must be web.config by convention.

It's also not the browser that reads these config files but the IIS webserver. IIS 'merges' the settings from applicationHost.config with the web.config(s) of your website and applies them as a whole.