Jan 21, 2011
visibility 4749
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
Parallel Development in Optimizely CMS SaaS: Shifting to a Schema Migration Mindset

  Part 3 of the Parallel Development series. The branch-scoped push script from Part 1 works. Run it on a feature branch where you've touched a...

Vipin Banka | Jul 25, 2026

From AI Agents to AI Workflow with Opal

Introduction In the first article in this series , we talked about AI agents in Optimizely Opal and walked through the process of creating a...

Igor Safonov | Jul 23, 2026

Building Your First Optimizely Opal AI Agent: a Hands-On Walkthrough

Introduction There's a common assumption that building an AI agent is something only engineers or developers can do. It isn't. At the Optimizely AN...

Igor Safonov | Jul 23, 2026

Advanced Task Manager Gets a Big Update

One of the things I keep coming back to with Optimizely's content approval workflow is that it's solid at the individual level - you know a piece o...

Adnan Zameer | Jul 21, 2026 |