Written by Phillip Blanton

There seems to be a lot of trouble encountered by people attempting their first install of DotnetNuke 4.x. I have developed a step by step guide for installing a new Dnn4 development system on your Windows XP machine, and I find that I am constantly looking for the last place I posted it so that I can copy and paste it into a new thread.

I figured that Falafel would be a good place to stick it. That way I can just post a link to this one static location whenever I need to share this information.

If you follow these steps to the letter, you *WILL* have a DotNetNuke installation running on Windows XP Professional. If you want to then open and compile the solution in Visual Studio, that is the subject of another post, but let's first get you installed...

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Update: There is a lot of confusion about which system account needs permission to the database and directory structure of your DNN installation. It used to be "ASPNET" on non XP and Server 2000 machines, and "NETWORK SERVICE" on Windows Server 2003 machines. Now it is a little more complicated.

If you are running IIS 6, then you should use "NETWORK SERVICE". If you are using IIS 5.x, then  you should use "ASPNET". Without regard to the OS.

The rese of these instructions will refer to "ASP System Account". Please substitute either ASPNET or  "NETWORK SERVICE" as appropriate to your version of IIS.
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1. Unzip the DotNetNuke 4.x Source Install zip into an empty directory where it will reside on your machine. In my case that is D:\Development\WebProjects\DnnDev.

2. Right click on the DnnDev directory and select "Sharing and Security" and click the Security tab.

(If you don't have a security tab, click "Tools | Folder Options", select the "View" tab, scroll to the bottom and turn off simple file sharing. Close the dialog and repeat step 2.)

3. Click the "Add" button and in the "Enter the Object Names to Select" area, enter the necessary ASP System Account.

4. Click the [Check Names] button and the system username will be verified and fully qualified. Click OK.

5. Select the new user account and give it "Modify" permission. It doesn't need "Full Control". Click OK.

6. Back in the WebRoot directory, Make a copy of the release.config file and rename it "web.config". Also copy the \config\SiteUrls.config file to WebRoot.

7. Open the web.config file in a text editor (Textpad is the best, so go buy it now!) I use SQLServer Developer edition and not SQL Server Express so these directions are for SQL Server.

Comment out the two SQL Express SiteSqlServer keys, and uncomment the SQL Server 2000 / 2005 ones and set the "value" element of them both as follows...

"Server=(local);Database=DnnDev;trusted_connection=yes;"

Make both SiteSqlServer keys have the same connection string. Save and close the text editor. Don't modify anything else in the web.config file.

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SQL Server:

 This is slightly different in SQL Server 2005 and SQLServer 2000, but the concepts are the same.

Before you create the database...

8. Start up SQL Server Enterprise Manager and expand the "Security" section. Make sure the ASP System Account has been added to the list of "Logins" and given default access to "master".

9. Collapse the security node, right click on the "Databases" node and select "New Database". Name the database DnnDev (or whatever you called it in the connection strings in step 7). Accept all defaults and let the Enterprise Manager create the database.

10. Expand the new DnnDev database node and select "Users". Right click in the users area and select "New Database User". From the drop down list, select the ASP System Account account you just created. Give it dbowner access. Click OK.

Close the SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

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IIS Administrator:

11. Open IIS Adminstrator applet and add a new virtual directory to the default website. Name it "DnnDev", point it to the D:\Development\WebProjects\DnnDev directory. Make sure "Read" and "Run Scripts" are checked and accept all other defaults.

12. Right Click the new website entry in IIS and click "Properties". Select the "ASP.NET" tab and make sure you are running the 2.0.50215.0 version of ASP.NET.

Setup is now complete. If there is not a problem with the system, opening up IE or Firefox and navigating to http://localhost/dnndev will instantiate the DotNetNuke installer. After the installer has completed, there will be a link at the bottom of the page that will take you to the new portal site. Installation will only run once. After which point, navigating to http://localhost/dnndev will just display the site.