Local Troubleshooting Technique for CloudFoundry HWC Apps Running in Windows 2012R2

Cloud Foundry gives us a simple way to get Windows applications normally hosted in IIS to production quickly with the HWC Buildpack.  However, when the application fails to stage or run, it can be difficult to figure out what is going on.  You can actually run your application locally in a similar way to the way the HWC Buildpack would cause your application to run in Cloud Foundry by running the HWC executable locally against your app.

The HWC Buildpack relies on the HWC project to actually run your application in Cloud Foundry.  The HWC process uses Microsoft's Hostable Web Core to run a mini version of IIS in a process that your application is hosted in.  The HWC project creates releases of the executable that you can download an run locally on your workstation.

Before running HWC, you'll need to make sure your workstation has some pre-requisites installed.  If you go to the Running the Tests (Windows Only) section of the README.md in the HWC Project, you will see a heading with the text "Install Windows/.NET Features from Powershell by running".  Execute the Powershell commands in that section to install the necessary Windows Features to be able to run hwc.exe.

At this point you can set any environment variables you need (particularly the PORT environment variable), and launch the hwc.exe process pointing at your IIS host-able application.  The PORT environment variable is the only required environment variable, and that controls the TCP port that hwc.exe will attempt to bind to when running your application.  You specify your application directory by passing an -appRootPath parameter to HWC that points to a directory with a Web.config file and the rest of of your application bits.

Here's an example taken from the HWC project's README.md of running the HWC process using Powershell:
& { $env:PORT=8080; .\hwc.exe -appRootPath "C:\wwwroot\inetpub\myapproot" }

You should see a response similar to the following:
Server started for c21246d3-d9de-4014-810f-ad3130214a79

At this point your could open a web browser to localhost:8080 (or whatever port you set in your PORT environment variable) and browse your site.  If you get errors, you can check the Windows Event log, or terminal window to see what is going on.

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