HTTP Error 405.0 - Method Not Allowed in IIS Express

okay so i ran into this same exact problem on IIS 7.5 when trying to PUT or DELETE it returned a 405.

i was specifically trying to setup a MEAN stack with IISnode module. when accessing the static HTML file IIS was serving up i was able to GET and PUSH but not PUT or DELETE.

-- the problem --

i believe that the issue is with IIS server itself. take a look at this post here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/saurabh_singh/2010/12/10/anonymous-put-in-webdav-on-iis-7-deprecated/

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2021641

it appears that IIS no longer allows Anonymous PUT or DELETE

so in the end i just went with a nodejs webserver instead

-- however --

i have not tried this but perhaps you might want to look into modifying the IIS system config file itself called the ApplicationHost.config located here:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config

make sure to use notepad with administrator privileges

let me know how it goes and i might try and do this later when i have time


I seem to pick up on a bit of frustration in the question, so the actual question is a bit unclear. What specifically is it that you are trying, but failing, to do? What do you expect of the answer?

Anyway, based on this comment in the question:

This is all by way to trying to use HTTP verbs:

and the corresponding samples involving a generic handler, I'll take a stab at showing what is needed to make it possible to PUT and DELETE a generic handler.

In order to allow PUT and DELETE on a generic handler, you must allow it in the web.config of the application. To do that you should register a handler for *.ashx as follows:

<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
        <add name="SimpleHandlerFactory-Integrated-WithPutDelete"
            path="*.ashx"
            verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE"
            type="System.Web.UI.SimpleHandlerFactory"
            resourceType="Unspecified"
            requireAccess="Script"
            preCondition="integratedMode" />
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>

Depending on how you originally set up the web site/application, there may or may not be a handler registered for type="System.Web.UI.SimpleHandlerFactory" in your web.config file. If there is one, you should be able to just modify that entry and add the verbs you want to allow.

You'll note that this entry has the preCondition="integratedMode". This should, I believe, work when debugging in Visual Studio using IIS Express. In a real IIS deployment, the handler registration may need to be modified to match the application pool that will run the application. For an application running in classic mode (not integrated), it would look something like this (not tested so may be wrong):

<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
        <add name="SimpleHandlerFactory-ISAPI-4.0_64bit-WithPutDelete" 
            path="*.ashx" 
            verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE" 
            modules="IsapiModule" 
            scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" 
            preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" 
            responseBufferLimit="0" />
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>

The exact details would depend on the framework version an bit-ness of the application pool.

If you are debugging in Visual Studio using IIS Express, you should have a look at the applicationhost.config which sets up a lot of the defaults regarding IIS Express. It is located in:

My Documents\IISExpress\config

The untested handler registration above for a classic pipeline application pool is a slight modification of a handler registration in that file. There are in my environment 6 separate entries for *.ashx, with varying preconditions, in that file.

It might be a good idea to explicitly remove all of these in your web.config if you want to have your own registration which allows PUT and DELETE. Not all of them would actually be active/registered at the same time since the preconditions are (I suppose) mutually exclusive, but at least for me it works to just remove them all, one after the other. In my environment the section with the removes looks like this:

<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-ISAPI-4.0_64bit"/>
<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-ISAPI-4.0_32bit"/>
<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0"/>
<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-Integrated"/>
<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-ISAPI-2.0"/>
<remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-ISAPI-2.0-64"/>

Hope this shines at least a bit of light into dark places!


There is a lot of talk about removing WebDAV and that will fix the problem - but if you're wondering what WebDAV is and what its used for, check out this page:

https://www.cloudwards.net/what-is-webdav/