When trying to browse the index.php page on brand new Grav install on IIS i only get a "http error 500" page

Question

I am trying to use Grav CMS (https://getgrav.org/) on a Windows Server 2012 R2 with IIS. I unzip the grav core package and have moved it to my folder named grav in the following location: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\

When i try to launch the site i get the following message to come up:

This page isn't working localhost is currently unable to handle this request. http error 500

If i add a couple of echo outputs in the index.php file then i do get those to appear until the following lines of code that never seem to run and may be what is causing my issue:

// Process the page
try {
    $grav->process();
} catch (\Exception $e) {
    $grav->fireEvent('onFatalException', new Event(array('exception' => 
$e)));
    throw $e;
}

This part seems to be what is causing the page to not load which i dont understand why it is doing so. I can make additional pages and put php code into them and i can render the page without issues.

I am at a loss right now because i made sure all the php modules are enabled and php is installed. I also installed php for IIS and made sure i did the URL rewrite for the htaccess file to a web.config file per the instructions.

Thank you very much for the help.

Answer 1

Figured it out. So I am using PHP 7 and found that a log gets created in the following location C:\Windows\Temp\PHP70x64_errors.log. Once I found that I found I had the following error message:

Uncaught RuntimeException: Opening file for writing failed on error in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\grav\vendor\rockettheme\toolbox\File\src\File.php:198

So this led me to look at the permission page on the Grav site and all of the fixes were for Linux and not Windows but this line caught my eye: The important thing to understand is that there is a potential issue if the user you use to edit your files on the file-system is different from the user that PHP runs under.

So I then needed to find out what user PHP was running under so I then created a test.php file and added the following:

<?php 
     echo exec('whoami');
?>

Which returned for me nt authority\iusr. So I then gave my whole Grav folder permissions for this user (probably could have just given it write) and voila it worked.