If you're not configuring Umbraco through a web installer, you've had your installs in place for years and never checked the permissions or whoever set the permissions up was lazy and gave IIS write access to the entire folder, there will come a time when you want to restrict modify access to just those user(s) who should have access.

You can find a (pretty) complete list of the files/folders that the Umbraco install should have access to here but assigning them across 101 different installs is a PITA . Thanks to a helpful PowerShell script to set folder permissions from PowerShell.nu you can easily automate the process.

For those of you not familiar with PowerShell (like me) complete instructions are below. For the rest, here's the command:

Get-ChildItem -path ##PATH TO YOUR INSTALL## 
| Where { $_.name -eq "Bin" -or $_.name -eq "Config" -or $_.name -eq "Css" -or $_.name -eq "Data" -or $_.name -eq "Masterpages" -or $_.name -eq "Media" -or $_.name -eq "Scripts" -or $_.name -eq "Umbraco" -or $_.name -eq "Umbraco_client" -or $_.name -eq "UserControls" -or $_.name -eq "Xslt" } 
| ForEach {./SetFolderPermission.ps1 -path $_.Fullname -Access "NETWORK SERVICE" -Permission Modify}

Instructions:

1. Save the SetFolderPermission.ps1 script to your server
2. Open your PowerShell console (I think it's installed by default if not, you can download PowerShell here)
3. Copy the above PowerShell command into notepad
4. Update "##PATH TO YOUR INSTALL##" to your Umbraco install
5. If your IIS install doesn't use NETWORK SERVICE as the default user, update it to your user
6. Make sure it's all on a single line
7. Copy/Paste/Run in PowerShell

Bonus

If you're uber lazy and just have a web folder of Umbraco installs you can set the path to the folder of Umbraco installs and use:

Get-ChildItem -path ##PATH TO YOUR FOLDER## -recurse
| Where { $_.name -eq "Bin" -or $_.name -eq "Config" -or $_.name -eq "Css" -or $_.name -eq "Data" -or $_.name -eq "Masterpages" -or $_.name -eq "Media" -or $_.name -eq "Scripts" -or $_.name -eq "Umbraco" -or $_.name -eq "Umbraco_client" -or $_.name -eq "UserControls" -or $_.name -eq "Xslt" } 
| ForEach {./SetFolderPermission.ps1 -path $_.Fullname -Access "NETWORK SERVICE" -Permission Modify}

I've not tried this mind you and can't recommend it but hey, it's there if you want it ;)

There are a lot of changes afoot at The Site Doctor at the moment -not just the new company identity, site and top secret plan but we're partnering with industry leaders to ensure we're able to offer the very best service possible.

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