ASP.NET MVC not serving default document

I have an ASP.NET MVC application where the default page should be index.html which is an actual file on disk.

I can browse to the file using www.mydomain.com/index.html so I know it w开发者_JAVA技巧ill be served and exists but if I use www.mydomain.com I get a 404.

I have ensured that the default document is correctly set in IIS7 and I have even gone so far as to commented out all the routes defined in my global.asax to ensure I don't have a route causing this problem.

So to summarize:

• I have an index.html file on disk and IIS7 is set to use index.html as the default document.
• If I remove my ASP.NET MVC application and leave the index.html file is served as the default document as expected.
• If I publish my ASP.NET MVC application then the index.html doesn't get served by default document.

Does anyone know how to get ASP.NET MVC to serve the default document?

ASP.Net MVC routing is controlled by the Global.asax / Global.asax.cs files. The out-of-the-box routing looks like this:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Default", // Route name
        "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
        );
}

When no path is specified, ie. www.domain.tld/, the route is the empty string, "". Therefore the routing looks for a controller with that name. In other words, it looks for a controller with no name at all. When it finds no such controller it serves up a 404 NOT FOUND error page.

To solve the problem, either map that path to something meaningful or else ignore that route entirely, passing control over to the index.html file:

routes.IgnoreRoute("");

I had a similar problem with a WebForms application. In your web.config make sure the resourceType attribute of the StaticFile handler under system.webServer is set to Either.

<add name="StaticFile" path="*" verb="*" type="" modules="StaticFileModule,DefaultDocumentModule,DirectoryListingModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="Either" ...

I found a way around this. If you want index.html to be in the root of your MVC application (i.e next to your controller/model/view/appdata etc folders), you can do this:

Say you have home.html, aboutus.html and contactus.html.

//this route matches (http://mydomain.com/somekindofstring)

routes.MapRoute(
    "SingleRootArg",
    "{id}",
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Details", id=""});

// so now that you have your route for all those random strings. 
// I had to do this for vanity urls. mydomain.com/ronburgandy  etc. however, 
// mydomain.com/index.html will also come in just how you'd expect. 

//Just an example of what you COULD do. the user would see it as root html. 

Public ActionResult Details(string id)
{

    //let me save you the trouble - favicon really comes in as a string *ANGER*
    if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(id) || id.ToLower().Contains("favicon.ico"))
        return Redirect("~/index.html");
    if(id == "aboutus.html")
        return Redirect("~/aboutus.html");
    if(id == "contactus.html")
        return Redirect("~/contactus.html");
    if(id == "index.html")
        return Redirect("~/index.html");
}

index.html aboutus.html index.html are now at the same level as my CSPROJ file.

Sorry for resurrecting this mummy, but i don't believe this issue was ever a default document issue. In fact you probably don't want to have a default document set as many of the other answerers have stated.

Had this problem as well, a similar problem. the cause of my issue was that the Application Pool for the site was set to use .NET Framework v2 and should have been set to v4. once I changed that it loaded correctly.

You could ignore the route in your MVC application and let IIS serve it.

routes.IgnoreRoute("index.html")
etc

I suspect you added index.html yourself as that extension would be unknown to the mvc framework.

Your default index page in mvc is //domain/home/index and is physically index.aspx.

If you call your domain using //domain then the routing engine will assume /home/index.aspx and not index.html.