This is how I got my ASP.NET 5 MVC site to run on IIS 8.5. I had some initial problems and most information I found on internet was about earlier beta versions of the framework. All of these had lots of steps and and none of them helped me.

Software Setup

• Windows Server 2012 R2 (fresh install)
• IIS 8.5
• DNX Version: dnx-clr-x64.1.0.0-rc1-update1
• Visual Studio 2015 Update 1

Server Installation

1. Added Server Role: Web Server (IIS).
   And also ASP.NET 4.5 (under Web Server (IIS) -> Web Server -> Application Development).
   This will also include the feature ASP.NET from .NET Framework and ISAPI Extensions, ISAPI Filters and also .NET Extensibility 4.5.
2. Installed the HttpPlatformHandler 1.2 from:
   http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/httpplatformhandler

Publishing Site

1. Compiled and Published the Web project in Visual Studio to a local folder.
   Configuration: Release – x64 (will probably work with Any CPU also).
   Target DNX Version: dnx-clr-x64.1.0.0-rc1-update1
2. Copied the published output to the Web Server.
3. Added a new  Site pointing to the wwwroot in the published folder.

And that was all that was necessary. Obviously running an ASP.NET 5 site is much easier now when the release candidate is out.

Publishig a new project created with Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 and ASP.NET MVC4 on IIS 8.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 only resulted in Error 403.14.

Since it was the first MVC project on that server I thought is was a configuration issue in IIS. After testing almost all suggestions found on Internet (most of the referring to IIS 7.5), I found someone with that same problem and had a solution.

The problem was the setting “Precompile during publish” when publishing. I publish to a local folder before sending it to the server and I’d selected that because I thought it would make the site faster. But this completely broke the site!

Disabling “Precompile during publish”, republishing it (locally) and sending it to the server and now it worked as expected!