Admin URL setup for Kentico 13

This kind of setup is not recommended nor supported - having the admin app nested underneath the live site app. This can cause issues with several features like page builder, form builder, web farm sync and so on because IIS will detect nested web.config files and some configuration might clash or not being applied at all. Please see the documentation, which is also solution to your problem and which says: "The IIS applications for the live site and administration must run "side-by-side". Nesting one of the applications under the other causes configuration errors and prevents certain parts of the system from working correctly."

You have two options:

1. (Preferred/recommended option) Create separate IIS sites for each app. Live site will be e.g. domain.com and the admin app will be using admin.domain.com domain. If you want your editors to use domain.com/admin to log in, use the admin redirection.

2. Create two separate virtual apps in the IIS under the web site. One for live site and second for admin app. Then, you will have the URLs like domain.com/site and domain.com/adminapp

While Juraj is correct, I can say we have set up multiple sites as you're explaining without issue. We have not experienced this: "Nesting one of the applications under the other causes configuration errors and prevents certain parts of the system from working correctly."

What it seems you have an issue with is your virtual directory on your main website. In IIS you'd set your site up like so:

So your domain would be domain.com/cms/admin to log in. Using simple IIS setup, you'll need that sub-application to get the CMS to run properly under the main MVC site. The only other way around this would be to set this up the same way and add a rewrite in the MVC site

@Brenden - well, it can be run like that but as you can see in the documentation, we do not recommend nor support it. We have seen many issues with this setup and it depends also on the front end app setup - especially what you will set in the web.config file. IIS then usually automatically inherits the web.config settings for the nested apps unless you "remove" or "clear" given settings. This happens mostly when using custom headers and CSPs - which is pretty common these days for security reasons to set the CSPs - and then this breaks the admin app. So, I would definitely not recommend this setup you mentioned. you can make it work, but you need to know what you are doing and how things work...

You are correct Juraj. We have found those issues and resolved them for MVC5 sites. However we don't have any issues with .NET 6 sites at all.

Maybe because you know what to do and hot to do it. But I would still play it safe and use separate IIS sites - it is also best practice in general to keep apps separated.