Special characters in custom account password

Is there a list of characters that need to be escaped for the Deploy to IIS step when setting the credentials when running the app pool as a custom user? Currently the account password is saved as a sensitive project variable.

When I use Octopus to deploy my site, the app pool won’t stay up because the password for the custom user is incorrect. However when I manually go set the username and password for the app pool identity in IIS with the same values I put in the variables. The site works.

There is an old thread out here on the same topic but it doesn’t seem there was ever a resolution. People just change their passwords to avoid possibly troublesome characters.

Current password I’m having issues with has the following symbols in it: & ^ %
Octopus Version: 2019.9.4

Hi Sara,

Thanks for getting in touch! I’m sorry about the confusing behavior here. I suspect it’s the same story with all non-alpha-numeric characters requiring escaping (that’s just a guess as unfortunately I don’t have a list). Did you have any luck escaping these characters in your sensitive variable? If not, would you be willing to send through your full task log from this deployment to hopefully shed a bit more light on this?

I look forward to hearing back!

Best regards,

Kenny