Umbraco v6.1.1 - Refresher - Clean Install - Part 1

Having been away from Umbraco development for a while, I decided to get the latest version of Umbraco and do a manual installation. In the meanwhile, I also wanted to make sure my source code was version controlled so that I could work off my desktop as well as my laptop.

Some of the stuff I want to achieve:

  1. Do a manual installation of Umbraco
  2. See how Umbraco behaves with MVC
  3. Use GitHub for Version Control
  4. Setup my local environment for easy debugging
  5. Use a free hosting provider to host my test website

Manual Installation of Umbraco

The latest version on Umbraco.com was version 6.1.1.
I downloaded the UmbracoCms.6.1.1.zip file from http://our.umbraco.org/contribute/releases/611 and unzipped it on my local machine.
Since I wanted to use GitHub to keep my two development environments (desktop & laptop) in sync, I created a "Github" directory at the root of my F drive. All the unzipped files from UmbracoCms.6.1.1.zip were placed in a "F:\Github\umbraco-playground" directory.

Creating the website in IIS

Next step was to setup IIS. My Desktop has a Windows Vista Business OS and I had installed IIS 7.0 sometime back. (TIP: you can start IIS using "inetmgr" from the Run dialog and check for the version on the MMC Menu -> Help -> About Internet Information Services)

I created a new website named as "Umbraco.Local" with the following bindings:

Type: http  
IP Address: All Unassigned  
Port: 80  
Host name: umbraco.local

I also created an Application Pool specific for this website as follows:

Name: Umbraco.Local  
.NET Framework version: .NET Framework v4.0.30319  
Managed Pipeline mode: Integrated  
Start application pool immediately: Checked

Accessing the site Locally

To access the URL http://umbraco.local I needed to add the following entry to the host file on my machine.

127.0.0.1 umbraco.local

Location of Host File: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Note that you would need to open up Notepad with the "Run as Administrator" option in Windows Vista in order to edit the host file.

Typed in http://umbraco.local on the browser and the Splash screen for Umbraco setup was on my browser...

I will write the details of that in my next post...


This article was originally written on Google's Blogger platform and ported to Hashnode on 17 Sep 2022.