Web Platform Installer

» see microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Microsoft shipped Web Platform Installer 1.0 on 21 January 2009, having announced it the previous October. The problem it solved was real and tedious. Getting a Windows machine to serve a website meant collecting IIS, the.NET Framework and a version of SQL Server Express that agreed with both, from separate download pages, in an order you had to already know. WebPI put a list in a window with checkboxes next to it and handled the ordering itself.

Version 2.0 in September 2009 opened the catalog to third-party software, which is where it got genuinely odd. The Web Application Gallery meant you could install WordPress or Drupal onto IIS from the same window that installed Visual Web Developer Express. Microsoft in 2009, shipping a one-click PHP application installer for its own web server. By July 2015 the gallery carried 82 titles.

This was a Windows server tool and I have never made a living in that part of the industry. I know it the way anyone knows a piece of infrastructure they meet through a Stack Overflow answer written in 2013 that says to just run WebPI and stop worrying about it. The answer is still up. The thing it tells you to run no longer works.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The last real release was 5.0 on 14 February 2013, and after that WebPI stopped changing while quietly becoming load-bearing. Microsoft's own product documentation routed people through it. Third-party vendors wrote it into their setup guides, and some of those guides outlived the tool by years. Intrexx, to pick one at random, still carried "Install the IIS Web Platform Installer" as a numbered deployment step long after there was anything at the other end of it.

That is what a package manager earns if it survives long enough. Nobody has warm feelings about it and everybody's install instructions mention it. The important structural detail is that the catalog was not shipped inside the installer. It was a live feed pulled from Microsoft's servers every time you opened the thing, which meant the product's usefulness was rented rather than owned.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 8 June 2021 the IIS team posted the end-of-support notice, setting out a staged retirement. Web Application Gallery updates stopped on 1 June 2021. Product support and catalog updates ended on 1 July 2022, and on 31 December 2022 the feed came off the servers while the installers came off the download center. Eighteen months of notice is more warning than most Microsoft products get, and the post's only stated reason was that products have a finite lifecycle.

The binary still runs. It simply cannot do anything, because the index it reads lives at a URL that returns nothing. Somebody uploaded a copy of the offline feed as it stood on 19 July 2022 to the Internet Archive, and that upload is now the only practical way to make WebPI install a single thing. A package manager whose entire value was being wired to a live catalog now survives as a frozen catalog in a public archive, which is a fair description of what happened to the whole Microsoft web stack it was built to serve.

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