How can I programatically analyze (and change) the configuration of IIS

Question

I'm relatively new to the Windows Server world (coming from *nix land). I'm used to analyzing a web-server's configuration by grepping through an apache config file.

Is there an equivalent file/group-of-files for IIS? Lacking that, is there an official scripting interface for IIS?

Answer 1

PowerShell would be the way to go.

Here are some stack overflow posts:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/powershell+iis6

Also, googling powershell IIS will get you started.

Answer 2

Default scripting tool in IIS is the ADSUTIL.VBS script in the \InetPubs\Scripts directory.

Using the Adsutil.vbs Administration Script

You can pretty much do anything to the IIS metabase with that tool.