Quick Guide for setting up SharePoint environment for Apps

Following several guides and going through many articles at last I am able to install SharePoint Apps on my environment, you will find several incomplete and confusing articles on internet.

I followed Vlad Catrinescu article which is to the point and actually works, it took me just 5 minutes to configure my test environment for installing apps from SharePoint online Store.

Here's link to Vlad's article,

http://www.scribd.com/doc/124831209/Configure-an-Environment-for-Apps-for-SharePoint-2013-Step-by-Step-Guide

Since the above article gets into much details along with screenshots, I will just mention important points you need to go through to get it working,

- Create a forward look-up zone with zone name e.g. "exampleapps.com"

- Create a New Alias (CNAME) with name as "*" and FQDN for target host as full name of your     SharePoint Server, e.g. www.exampleServer.com or whatever's your server's name is

- Now on your try to ping Apps-23423423423.exampleapps.com and get the response, if it doesn't work then either you entered FQDN of target host wrong or your DNS server isn't locating your SharePoint web server. Put a comment if you get stuck here and I will try to help.

- Create, configure and start SharePoint App management and Subscription server on your SharePoint server

-  Now Configure App URLs in Central Admin, App domain going to be exampleapps.com in this case and App prefix will be "Apps"

- You will need to configure internet facing endpoints for apps, so I just enabled web application scoped feature named as "Apps that require accessible internet facing endpoints" on my port 80 web application.

- Create a new web application on port 80, but keep the Host Header option empty and rest options as usual, now note, if you used SharePoint configuration wizard then you don't need to create a new web application because SharePoint configuration wizard by default creates a web application without host headers, so all you need to do is to create a root site collection.

- Last but important step, delete Default Website in IIS Server, otherwise you will receive 404 errors for sharepoint apps.

Note: I followed these steps on a development server, so try them on production on your own risk :-).

MSDN article if you want to follow for setting up App domain.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236.aspx