Optimizely
Jan 21, 2011
visibility 4852
star star star star star
(1 votes)

Initialize Community 4.0 without IIS

Introduction

Sometimes you want to initialize EPiServer Community without involving the IIS.  For example when you decide not to use IIS for servicing your web pages or when you want to do unit testing.

Command line program

I've therefore created a little command line program that does this. It initializes Community (and also search) and fetches the first blog post made (ID = 1). You can then use this code as a base for doing your own programs that need access to the Community API.

To use it just compile it and place it amongs a web.config (for a community site) and a connectionstrings.config along with every dll the web.config wants plus the dll's the project needs.

Download

 InitializeCommunityCommandLine

 References

 

Thanks to Kristoffer @ dev for giving me the inspiration and the file this program was heavily based on!

Jan 21, 2011

Comments

Jan 21, 2011 07:51 PM

Thank you Thomas, this was exactly what I was looking for!

Jan 21, 2011 10:30 PM

Very cool Tobias. ;-) This is a much smoother way than the hack including reflection that was needed in Community 3.x.

Jan 24, 2011 04:24 AM

Nice post Tobias!

Jan 24, 2011 02:31 PM

This code seems only to handle single site installations. It crashes when Initialize(null) is called on SiteMappingConfiguration if episerver.config contains multiple sites. To solve this i just changed the following

//before
new SiteMappingConfiguration().Initialize(null);
SiteMappingConfiguration.Instance.SiteId = "MyRelateSite";

//after
SiteMappingConfiguration.CurrentHostNameResolver = delegate { return "local.myrelatesite.com"; };
new SiteMappingConfiguration().Initialize(null);

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Migrating ContentArea.FilteredItems in Optimizely CMS 13

If you have

Adnan Zameer | Oct 19, 2026 |

Categories have landed in Optimizely SaaS CMS: structure, translate, tag and query

Categories arrived in Optimizely SaaS CMS at the end of August, with Graph support alongside. I have wanted a proper taxonomy in SaaS since the fir...

Minesh Shah (Netcel) | Oct 19, 2026

Exploring Cached Templates and Cursor Pagination in the Optimizely Graph C# SDK

While experimenting with the  Optimizely Graph C# SDK (13.3.0) in my local Optimizely CMS 13 Alloy project, I came across two interesting findings:...

Mardy | Oct 19, 2026

EPiServer.ImageLibrary.ImageSharp 2.0.7 delisted from NuGet feed

We have delisted version 2.0.7 of the EPiServer.ImageLibrary.ImageSharp package from the NuGet feed due to a packaging issue. This version was...

Phu Nguyen | Oct 19, 2026