How to troubleshoot "An error occurred while starting the application"

This error means something went wrong when the application tried to start. It's a generic error and the root cause can be a variety of different reasons. This documentation will show you how to troubleshoot and retrieve a more specific error message. Please go through these steps to get a specific error and contact ThoughtFarmer Support for further assistance.

How to get a more specific error

We need to edit the application's web config file to enable it to output a more specific error.

1) Open up IIS
2) Right click on your site under the "Sites" folder, then click "Explore"

3) The file explorer should've opened up your site's "web" folder. In that folder, find the "web.config" file. Open notepad in admin mode and open the "web.config" file.
4) In "web.config", find the line below. 

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\ORC.TF.Web.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" requestTimeout="00:10:00" shutdownTimeLimit="10" hostingModel="InProcess">

5) Change this part stdoutLogEnabled="false" into stdoutLogEnabled="true". Save the file. So your line should now look like this:

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\ORC.TF.Web.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="true" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" requestTimeout="00:10:00" shutdownTimeLimit="10" hostingModel="InProcess">

This enables the specific error to be outputted for your site. 

6) Go back to that web folder that we opened in step 3. If there's not yet already a folder called "logs", create one.
7) Go to your site again to reproduce that generic error. This should trigger the error message log to be created in the "logs" folder.
8) Go to your "logs" folder. You should see a file named "stdout" with some numbers after it (ex: stdout_20190927035328_28704) Open it to view the specific error message. Please contact ThoughtFarmer with your specific error for further assistance.

How to turn off error logging

1) In IIS, right click on your site under the "Sites" folder, then click "Explore" to open the "web" folder again
2)  Find the "web.config" file. Open notepad in admin mode and open the "web.config" file.
3) In "web.config", find the line below. 

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\ORC.TF.Web.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="true" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" requestTimeout="00:10:00" shutdownTimeLimit="10" hostingModel="InProcess">

5) Change this part stdoutLogEnabled="true" into stdoutLogEnabled="false". Save the file. So your line should now look like this:

<aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\ORC.TF.Web.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="true" requestTimeout="00:10:00" shutdownTimeLimit="10" hostingModel="InProcess">