If you’re banging your head against the wall because your MVC5 application does not run on IIS 7, I have the solution for you.

First, let’s quickly go through some basic stuff that you probably read 10x times already, but still usefull to understand if this problem affects you or not.

You got your application deployed, the application pool is set to 4.0 .NET Framework and you didn’t touch the directory privileges (honestly, you don’t need to change folder permissions unless you’re handling files from your code, trust me!) but still you get a 403 error stating that either you don’t have permissions or the server is not set to list the contents of a directory.

The solution, is simple, just open a command promt window and type this:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

More information on aspnet_regiis.