Creating host named SharePoint Web Application

Please Note : This is for your stand alone, development VM.

When we care Web Applications in Central Administration, an IIS site is created in the background.

By default these web applications have url - http://serverName:portNumber/  
The portNumber is different for the web applications.

What if we wish to have fancy urls for these SPWebApplications ?

Please follow the steps :-

1. Choose your domain and make an entry in the host file of your VM.

           In my I choose - sp.akpcorp.com

           

           > Goto the host file - Path (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc)

           > Make an entry in hosts file

             

     

      

2. Create Web Application from the Central Admin

Please make below changes in the pop up, for creating a web application.

     

3. Congrats! You host named web application is created.

4. Disable LoopBack.

If you get a prompt for the user and you may face the following issues: 

· There is continuous prompt for the credentials 

· HTTP 401.1 error 

This shows that there is a problem with the Loopback configuration. This case should occur only when we access the application from the server machine. 

For fixing the problem we have to disable Loopback value inside registry. 

Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and locate the following key: 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa 

Create a new Key Value of type DWORD inside it and set the value to 1

     

Note : Two points are to be taken care.

1. All web applications should have different host name. As the port is 80 for all, they have to be distinguished on host name.

2. When you deploy SharePoint Apps, on the site collections created in these Web Applications, you will face some issue. But, thankfully there is a workaround to that too. Which I will deal in my next blog on setting up App deployment environment.