I have a large wordpress site that I migrated from AWS/Linux to a different host that is Windows Server 2016.

I have been developing on wordpress for years but this is my first time back on Windows server in a while.

I remember that when updating wordpress it would write a web.config file that would update the rewrite structure for that directory. Now rewrites are basically broken - in that you shouldn't have admin choices that break your site.

Out of the box Windows + IIS your rewrites have to contain index.php in the function or you go straight to post id.

What is weird is that when you choose permalink - /%category%/%postname%/ it is a 404 but if you manually add index.php before the category in the url it works.

So how is this supposed to work on Windows server now? I am guessing web.config isn't used. Has wordpress dev given up on windows servers and we just write our rewrite rules in IIS? Just trying to figure out the lay of the land as I have about 5 more sites to migrate and would like to best practices (well not really server best practices but wordpress best practices since the others taking over the sites after migration will not be as technical).

Just note that I did try to turn on the web.config and it gives a 500. Changing permalinks did nothing at all on the server - no added .htaccess nor a new web.config. Let me know if you need any other info.