Minimal ASP.NET Core Web Server

Build and deploy a cross-platform webserver with a REST API using ASP.NET Core.

This will let you set up a minimal ASP.Net Core project. You can use it for the basis for other projects.

Pre-requisites

• .NET Core 3.1 SDK : https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download
• VSCode : https://code.visualstudio.com/ (recommended)

Instructions

Checkout this repo.

Open the folder in VSCode. Open an integrated terminal window with PowerShell.

The WebServer directory contains a minimal ASP.NET Core web API project.

We can run it with the dotnet command.

cd WebServer
dotnet run

You should see the following:

info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Now listening on: http://localhost:5000
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Hosting environment: Production
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Content root path: C:\...\WebServer

Visit the endpoint

The server is running at http://localhost:5000. Navigate to it in the web browser, and you should see a 'page can't be found' error.

The root doesn't serve any pages. Open WebServer/Controllers/ProductsController.

Look at the ProductsController class declaration:

[ApiController]
[Route("[controller]")]
public class ProductsController : ControllerBase

The [ApiController] attribute means this is a 'controller' for a specific endpoint.

The [Route("[controller]")] means a route is mapped to the name of the controller, in this case, /product.

Look at the GetAll() method declaration:

[HttpGet]
public IEnumerable<string> GetAll()

The [HttpGet] attribute means this method handles HTTP GET requests.

Therefore, a HTTP GET request for http://localhost:5000/Products should return something.

Open http://localhost:5000/Products in the browser.

Stop your server, and edit GetAll so it returns more data. For instance, amend it to serve "SQL Source Control" and "SQL Compare".

Open http://localhost:5000/Products to see the result.

Access the endpoint

You can change the URL the server listens to with the --urls argument when you use dotnet run

Try dotnet run --urls="http://*:5000"

The * wildcard means you can access your api using [machine-name]:5000, e.g. DEV-JOEB:5000

Build and deploy

Install the .NET Core 3.1 Runtime: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download

Build an executable for your application: dotnet publish --output="./output

You can now execute the webserver application. The --urls argument will also work.

So you can do something like:

.\output\WebServer.exe --urls="https://*:5000"

Cross platform

You can build the application for Mac and Linux also. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-publish.