2 SiteCollections in same web app - what is special about the root site collection?
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10-12-2019 - |
Question
So, I have these 2 site collections within a single web app at port 83:
- Main Site Collection: /
- Nested Site Collection: /sites/custom/
Again, these are 2 separate isolation boundaries.. each is assigned to it's own content database...
For the main collection, I can run these 2 commands in stsadm all day long.. with no problems:
stsadm -o deletesite -url http://devSP1.contoso.local:83/
stsadm -o createsite -url http://devSP1.contoso.local:83/ -owneremail me@contoso.com -ownerlogin CONTOSO\me -siteTemplate "STS#1" -description "This is a dev site"
No errors. The database is not dropped between calls or anything like that.
If I run these commands, however, the 'createsite' command fails...
stsadm -o deletesite -url http://devSP1.contoso.local:83/sites/custom/
stsadm -o createsite -url http://devSP1.contoso.local:83/sites/custom/ -owneremail me@contoso.com -ownerlogin CONTOSO\me -siteTemplate "STS#1" -description "This is a dev site"
and I've lost my content db, etc. I have to go into central admin to recreate my SiteCollection before I can run my 'createsite' command.
Here's the error, fwiw:
The URL '/sites/custom/' is invalid. It may contain illegal characters, or be too long.
Solution 2
Ok. I finally understand where my knowledge gap was tripping me up. I totally was naive about how Managed Paths (and their resulting associated site collections) work.
In my original question, I compared experiences between two different site collections. However, the first site collection was a root site collection hanging off an Explicit managed path, while the other site collection was NOT a root site collection as it hung like a leaf off of a wildcard managed path.
Running a 'delete' stsadm command gets you different results depending on whether the site collection is root or not.
Now, I've got 2 site collections:
- Main Site Collection: /
- Nested Site Collection: /custom/
and this time I created the 2nd one as explicit. So, the resulting /custom/ site is a root collection site similar to the default/first one.
Now I can run my stsadm commands in a repeated fashion as desired and get the results I was wanting.
OTHER TIPS
Something isn't matching up here. Your error is about /custom/ross/, but your commands don't mention ross. Are you trying to create another site collection under custom?
For you to create site collections, you need to use a managed path. By default, /sites/ is setup as a managed path on your web application (see Central Admin > Manage web applications > Managed paths in Ribbon). You'll have to create a new managed path if you want to create additional site collections elsewhere.
HTH