⚡ IISBlitz

A fast desktop console for the IIS sites on a Windows server: start, stop and recycle, edit appsettings and web.config in place, watch CPU and memory of every app pool, read logs and Windows events, take a memory dump — one portable exe that keeps itself up to date. Built with Avalonia UI and .NET 10.

Features

Sites and pools

• Start / stop / restart a site, start / stop / recycle its application pool
• Applications of the site with their pools and a Recycle per pool — recycling restarts one pool only, so sub-applications in other pools are not touched
• Bindings and SSL certificates (subject, issuer, expiry, thumbprint) at a glance
• Automatic GET /health probe — shows the status and version the deployed app reports
• Open the site in the browser or its folder in Explorer, copy the physical path

Configuration

• appsettings.json editor with JSON highlighting: chips for base, Development, Production and any other appsettings.*.json found; missing files are created on save
• Apply to web.config writes ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT for the selected file's environment; the toolbar shows what web.config currently sets (or that it is not set and ASP.NET Core defaults to Production)
• web.config editor with XML highlighting, save and reload from disk
• Any file as a tab — the + in the tab strip opens a file of the site (highlighting by extension); open tabs are remembered per site and come back next time, Ctrl+S saves all of them
• Folder permissions of the site: list, add and remove ACL entries

Monitoring

• Live CPU and memory of every app pool's worker processes — next to each site in the sidebar, on the overview cards and as two-minute charts; the worker table updates every two seconds
• Memory dump — one click writes a full dump of a worker process (MiniDumpWriteDump) to Documents\IISBlitz\dumps and opens Explorer; the file opens in Visual Studio, WinDbg or dotnet-dump

Logs and events

• Log viewer for the site's logs folder (tail of the selected file)
• Search across all log files with a hit count per file and highlighted matches
• Windows Event Log: IIS / ASP.NET Core / WAS events of the last 24 hours, filtered by level, with a detail pane and copy

UI

• Command palette (Ctrl+K): fuzzy search across sites, tabs and actions — recycle, restart, dump a worker, switch the update channel, open the app log…
• Theme switch System / Light / Dark (Ctrl+Shift+L cycles); System follows Windows live, Light and Dark are remembered
• Keyboard: F5 refresh · Ctrl+S save · Ctrl+R recycle · Ctrl+F filter sites
• Version in the header, update banner and updater state in the status bar

Download

Unzip IISBlitz-win-x64.zip (or win-arm64) somewhere writable — for example C:\Tools\IISBlitz — and run IISBlitz.exe as administrator; IIS can only be managed from an elevated process. The exe is self-contained: nothing else to install.

Updates

IISBlitz updates itself through TomLabs.AutoUpdate:

• A nightly build follows the nightly pre-release, a release follows stable; switch the channel from the command palette ("Switch to nightly/stable updates"), the choice is remembered.
• The app checks a few seconds after start and every six hours. When a newer build exists the status bar shows "v0.7.0 available · Update"; the zip is downloaded to %LOCALAPPDATA%\IISBlitz\updates, its SHA-256 checked, the manifest's ECDSA signature verified, and Restart to update swaps the exe and relaunches with the same elevation.
• The previous exe stays as IISBlitz.exe.old until the new build shows its window; a build that fails to start is rolled back automatically.
• "Check for updates" in the palette runs a check now; the result (up to date, check failed: …, or why updating is off — read-only folder, second instance) is shown in the status bar.

Diagnostics

Because the app runs elevated, these live in the profile of the account you elevated with.

Building

git clone https://github.com/TomasBouda/IISBlitz.git
cd IISBlitz
dotnet run --project src/TomLabs.IISBlitz.App

The updater library comes from nuget.org (TomLabs.AutoUpdate.Avalonia). A release-style build — self-contained, trimmed, single file, ~25 MB:

dotnet publish src/TomLabs.IISBlitz.App/TomLabs.IISBlitz.App.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 -o publish

IISBLITZ_UPDATE_MANIFEST=https://host/latest.json points the updater at a test manifest instead of GitHub.

Releasing

Every push to master publishes the nightly pre-release. A stable release is a tag:

git tag v0.7.0
git push origin v0.7.0

Both go through the shared publish-app.yml workflow of TomLabs.AutoUpdate, which builds win-x64 and win-arm64, attaches update.json (version, commit, SHA-256 per asset) and signs it with the UPDATE_SIGNING_KEY repository secret. Bump <VersionPrefix> in the csproj and add a section to CHANGELOG.md first.

Tech stack

License

MIT © Tomáš Bouda