Setup Web and Database Server

Software Requirements for Web Servers

The Web server where you install the Sana Commerce webstore and Sana Admin must meet software requirements listed in the following table:

The following components apply to all supported versions of operating system and IIS:

• It is required to protect the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user's computer and the Sana web store. You will need to set up HTTPS in order to protect your users' connection to the Sana web store. To do this, the Web server which hosts the Sana web store must support TLS 1.2.
  
  
• SMTP is required. You can configure Sana to use an external SMTP server or a local virtual SMTP server that relies on the external SMTP server. For more information, see 'Configure SMTP'.
  
  
• It is highly recommended to enable IIS logging. It can help to troubleshoot potential web site issues. For more information about IIS logging, see 'Configuring Logging in IIS 7'.

Internet Information Services (IIS) should be installed on the Web server. IIS is the Web server role that is included with all versions of Microsoft operating systems. IIS versions differ depending on the version of operating system.

Sana Commerce supports the following IIS versions:

Windows Server operating systems have all the IIS features that are needed to support hosting of the web site.

IIS can be installed using Add Roles and Features Wizard in Server Manager.

To install IIS you need to install the Web Server (IIS) role. Adding this role will install IIS with the default set of components.

If you have any questions on how to install IIS or its components you should refer to the official Microsoft documentation depending on your version of operating system and IIS.

Below you can see more detailed information about Web server role services that should be installed depending on whether you are running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2008.

Windows Server 2012

Web Server (IIS) Role

When the Web Server (IIS) role is installed you need to install the Basic Authentication and ASP.NET 4.5 role services. Adding ASP.NET 4.5 role service will also install ISAPI Extensions, ISAPI Filters and .NET Extensibility 4.5.

Basic Authentication and ASP.NET 4.5

Windows Server 2008

If you are using Windows Server 2008 you should also install the Web Server (IIS) role and then Basic Authentication and ASP.NET role services. .NET Framework 4.5 should be installed on the Web server as it is not included in Windows Server 2008.

Add Role Services: Basic Authentication and ASP.NET (Windows Server 2008)

ASP.NET 4.5 applications should be registered with IIS. On Windows Server 2008 this can be done by executing the Aspnet_regiis command from the command prompt. For more information, see 'ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool (Aspnet_regiis.exe)' on the Microsoft Developer Network web site.

When everything is done check whether ASP.NET 4.5 is allowed  to run in IIS. This can be checked in IIS on the 'ISAPI and CGI Registrations' page.

ISAPI and CGI Restrictions

 NOTE

If you are going to install and use the Sana Mobile app, then you should also install the .NET HTTP Activation feature on the Web server. Use Windows Server Manager to install the HTTP Activation feature. For more information about how to install it, see 'The 'HTTP Activation' feature is not installed' in the Microsoft Library.

Sana with the integrated pipeline mode

Starting from version 9.3.2, Sana supports the integrated pipeline mode of the application pool.

This can be useful to those who use Microsoft Azure Application Insights as it does not support the classic pipeline mode. Azure Application Insights is a powerful tool which can help you to monitor your web store and automatically detect performance issues. You can use this service to constantly improve performance and stability of your web store and find out the root cause of the issues, if there are any.

In the Internet Information Service (IIS) Manager, application pool can run either in the classic or integrated pipeline mode. The application pool mode affects how the server processes requests for managed code. In Sana 9.3.2, a user who installs Sana on the Web server should enable the integrated pipeline mode for the Sana application pool in IIS manually, if necessary.

When you install Sana 9.3.3, the integrated pipeline mode is enabled by default, but you can still change it manually to classic in IIS, if necessary.

As the integrated pipeline mode does not support Basic Authentication, the Anonymous Authentication is used for all deployment types in Sana 9.3.3.

The only difference between the test, beta and live deployment types is that when you install Sana on the test environment, the web store and Sana Admin are not externally accessible unlike the beta and live deployments. There is no NT popup regardless of the deployment type you select.

When Sana is installed, you can still change the pipeline mode of the application pool to classic and set up Basic Authentication manually, if necessary.

See also:
Installing IIS 8.5 on Windows Server 2012 R2
Modules in IIS 8.5
Installing IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2
Available Web Server (IIS) Role Services in IIS 7.5
Available Role Services in IIS 7.0