Is there an API or programmatic way to convert ".htaccess" rewrites to "web.config" IIS Rewrites?

Is there an API or programmatic way to convert ".htaccess" rewrites to "web.config" IIS Rewrites? - .htaccess files are extremely useful in many cases for users who either do not have root permissions or for users who simply aren't comfortable in making changes in their web server's configuration file. Trying to debug .htaccess not working isn't always the easiest thing to do, however, hopefully by checking the discuss below mentioned about htaccess, iis, url-rewriting, , .htaccess common problems as well as the troubleshooting tips, you'll have a better grasp on what you may have to modify to get your .htaccess file running smoothly.Problem :

I know I can do it in IIS Manager, but I am looking for some programmatic way to do it. We need to do this for customer all the time. So it would be great if there's a programmatic way of doing so.

Solution :

There isn't a reliable programmatic way to automatically convert .htaccess files to web.config files because IIS's configuration is quite different from Apache's, as well as their configuration file formats.

There are some sites which claim to do automatic conversions, but the scope and accuracy of these are questionable.

You can however suggest that your client add an IIS module that uses standard regular expressions, since Apache's mod_rewrite module uses Perl Compatible Regular Expression vocabulary - see: Apache - mod_rewrite-Regular Expressions

One such module is ISAPI_Rewrite, which is written in pure C/C++. From their FAQ's:

ISAPI_Rewrite is a rule-based rewriting tool to rewrite requested URLs
on the fly. ISAPI_Rewrite uses regular expression rules. With regular
expressions you don't need to write a thousands check strings. The
comparison and replace of URLs can be done with a few string patterns.

Using regular expressions for IIS should help to greatly speedup conversions of Apache RewriteRule's.

Additionally, if you would like to do some further testing, give the htaccess tester tool a try. It allows you to specify a certain URL as well as the rules you would like to include and then shows which rules were tested, which ones met the criteria, and which ones were executed.