Sitecore Graphical Setup Broken Dependency On Deprecated Web Platform Installer

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI) was retired on December 31, 2022. However the Sitecore graphical setup continues to have a dependency on WebPI to install prerequisites such as Url Rewrite 2.1.

If you are using the graphical setup on a machine that has been used to install Sitecore before the retirement date then this probably won’t be an issue for you.

In my case I usually setup new instances of Sitecore on clean machines and unfortunately the graphical setup fails silently when installing Url Rewrite. This is because the WebPI API still exists and returns an empty response.

To get around this issue while waiting for Sitecore to resolve it you will need to download and install Url Rewrite manually before running the graphical setup. But again, this will only be the case if using a machine that has not previously had Sitecore installed on it before the retirement date.

Alternatively you could write your own SIF task to download URL Rewrite from the correct location and install it ;).