index.html in sharepoint iis site's root

Question

Has anyone tried to put a regular file to the root directory of a sharepoint web application's IIS site. It does not work. For example create an index.html file in the root directory of your web application on the server filesystem and call it like sharepointwebappurl/index.html this will not work. But create a directory in (e.g. subfolder) and put index.html into that folder. sharepointwebappurl/subfolder/index.html now it works

I am aware of some exceptions (put robot.txt in IIS root, it works)

I know I can upload index.html via Sharepoint Designer to the root folder of a web app and keep it in content db. But this option is not suitable for our case.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

For the most part, IIS doesn't look to the file system directly for web content when serving SharePoint web applications. Rather, it looks to SharePoint to provide the content. SharePoint serves up content from a combination of database sources and file system sources. If you want to put something on the file system, it should go in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS folder where it will be available in the /_layouts/ folder of each site.

If you want to work with the files served up by a SharePoint site, you can use SharePoint Designer. This will allow you to upload an Index.html file to the root of a SharePoint site.