ANCM crashes with shadow copy enabled and the new deployment deleted a directory

[someguy20336]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

I am using the shadow copy feature in .NET 7. We got the following crash in the ANCM after deploying a change that deleted a directory under our wwwroot folder and the entire site was down with a 500 error until I added the empty directory back.

Application '/LM/W3SVC/6/ROOT' with physical root 'C:\Site\' failed to load coreclr. Exception message:
Unexpected exception: directory_iterator::directory_iterator: The system cannot find the path specified.: "C:\Site\wwwroot\lib"

However, I was able to eliminate the issue for subsequent deployments that might delete directories all together by using a pretty undocumented cleanShadowCopyDirectory setting found in #28357.

So it seems as if the ANCM is iterating on the shadow copied directory somewhere, but not checking if the folder actually exists in the newly deployed application.

I am not a C++ developer nor have I had a chance to actually run this code from source, but I have a hunch it is something to do with Environment::CheckUpToDate, which appears to be iterating directories without checking for existence. If I am reading it correctly:

• It starts at the root of each directory (source = deployed app, destination = shadow copied)
• It iterates files/directories in the source. If the item is a directory, recursively call CheckUpToDate, BUT with the destination directory as the source now - and it keeps flipping back and forth without checking whether the directory exists. My guess is that the flow goes like this for each recursive call:
  • source: <web root>\, destination = <shadow copy root>\
  • source: <shadow copy root>\wwwroot, destination = <web root>\wwwroot
  • source: <web root>\wwwroot\lib, destination = shadow copy root>\wwwroot\lib
    • source was set that way because it existed in <shadow copy root>\wwwroot\lib, but it does not actually exist in the newly deployed app. CheckUpToDate attempts to iterate the directory and we crash.

Expected Behavior

If a directory is deleted in the deployed app, shadow copy should handle that and not crash.

Steps To Reproduce

• Create an ASP.NET Core 7 application
• Set it up for shadow copy (but don't use cleanShadowCopyDirectory)
• Create a file under wwwroot/lib for example
• Deploy it to an IIS site (make sure the IIS site is set up for shadow copy as well with all the permissions)
  • We use robocopy to publish the site from CI and copy it into the site's root folder.
• Run the site, see that it runs just fine
• Make some changes to your project:
  • Delete the lib directory,
  • Make a change to C# code, re-compile (so as to simulate a new deployment)
• publish and re-deploy.
• See that it crashes when trying to access the site. You will not be able to recover from this crash.

I can try to put together a sample repo if needed, but it seems to be as simple as that.

Exceptions (if any)

directory_iterator::directory_iterator: The system cannot find the path specified.: <path to deleted directory>

.NET Version

2.2.200 (but this is on a server that only needs the runtime)

Anything else?

(Note: this is our IIS Server and we don't keep the SDK up to date, we just install the runtime. I don't feel like the SDK really has an impact here anyway - but let me know if I am misunderstanding that.)

NET Core SDK (reflecting any global.json):
Version: 2.2.300
Commit: 73efd5bd87

Runtime Environment:
OS Name: Windows
OS Version: 10.0.17763
OS Platform: Windows
RID: win10-x64
Base Path: C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\2.2.300\

Host:
Version: 7.0.2
Architecture: x64
Commit: d037e070eb

.NET SDKs installed:
2.2.300 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk]

.NET runtimes installed:
Microsoft.AspNetCore.All 2.2.5 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.AspNetCore.All]
Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 2.2.5 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 3.1.14 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 5.0.5 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 6.0.9 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 7.0.2 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.AspNetCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.2.5 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 3.1.14 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 5.0.5 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 6.0.9 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 7.0.2 C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared[Microsoft.NETCore.App]

Other architectures found:
x86 [C:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet]
registered at [HKLM\SOFTWARE\dotnet\Setup\InstalledVersions\x86\InstallLocation]

Environment variables:
Not set

global.json file:
Not found

Learn more:
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https://aka.ms/dotnet/download

[amcasey]

Do you want to take a look at this one, @mgravell? It's probably not related to #48296, but it's in the same vicinity.

[imranbaloch]

Thanks for the hint @someguy20336, I was scratching my head why suddenly my site stopped working when using Shadow Copy Deployment. It is so much annoying.

[DanDiplo]

@someguy20336 What value are you setting cleanShadowCopyDirectory to that prevents this error?

[someguy20336]

Should just be true - you can see it used in #28357

Edit: ok yea they show false in that PR, but I am using true to do the clean

[someguy20336]

Coming back in here for 2 things:

EDIT: removing the first one. Turns out to have been a permissions issue, though a little weird. We (allegedly) added the app pool user to a group that should have had full access to the shadow folder, but the site was hard crashing on startup. I could not personally verify this user was in the group, but I was able to add the app pool user directly to the shadow copy folder and it worked. So chalking it up to a fluke, but maybe I am overlooking some other permission issue. Don't really care at this point.

Second - any update on a possible fix plan?