YII2 An internal server error occurred in IIS 8.5 - iis-8

Question

I used composer to successfully install and run yii2 version 2.0.10 in my laptop using xampp but when I installed it in windows server 2012 r2 with IIS v 8.5, it shows An internal server error occurred error. I did not change or edited any of the files from the fresh installation.
I tried renaming the index.php and created new index.php with just simple echo and it worked fine.
EDIT - here is the server log.
#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 8.5
#Version: 1.0
#Date: 2017-01-05 23:56:51
#Fields: date time s-ip cs-method cs-uri-stem cs-uri-query s-port cs-username c-ip cs(User-Agent) cs(Referer) sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status time-taken
2017-01-05 23:56:51 ::1 GET /advanced/frontend/web/ - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 http://localhost/advanced/frontend/ 500 0 0 5893
2017-01-05 23:56:56 ::1 GET /advanced/ - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 - 200 0 0 21
2017-01-05 23:56:59 ::1 GET /advanced/frontend/ - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 http://localhost/advanced/ 200 0 0 3
2017-01-05 23:57:01 ::1 GET /advanced/frontend/web/ - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 http://localhost/advanced/frontend/ 500 0 0 103
2017-01-05 23:59:35 ::1 GET /advanced/frontend/web/ - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 http://localhost/advanced/frontend/ 500 0 0 61
2017-01-05 23:59:35 ::1 GET /favicon.ico - 80 - ::1 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+6.3;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/55.0.2883.87+Safari/537.36 http://localhost/advanced/frontend/web/ 404 0 2 10
EDIT 2.
Tried installing new one under development and it now gave different error.

Answer 1

Normally Yii is .htaccess for its mod-rewrite configuration. Do you convert it to an equivalent web.config so IIS can interpret it?

Answer 2

You need to add a web.config file in frontend/web/ and in the backend/web/
IIS Does Not Support .htaccess Files
Content of web.config
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<directoryBrowse enabled="false" />
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Hide Yii Index" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="." ignoreCase="false" />
<conditions>
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile"
ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory"
ignoreCase="false" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" appendQueryString="true" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>