ASP.NET Core MVC 2.0 Cookbook

The first step is to open a web browser and navigate to the http://dot.net/core site. It'll detect a host operating system, and will show downloading and installation steps.

Docker usually helps developers to scale their applications with minimum management cost.

After installing .NET Core 2.0 SDK, you can open the Terminal/Command Prompt window and run the following command:

dotnet --info

This command displays the installed and most recent .NET Core SDK version (2.0.2 at the time this book was written), Runtime Environment info (OS platform, architecture, version, and more), and .NET Core SDK installation path:

We can see Base Path includes the .NET Core SDK version. If we remove that version from the path and open that path in Finder/Explorer, we can see all the installed .NET Core SDK versions:

It's as easy as deleting a folder to remove any .NET Core SDK version on a machine.

With dotnet CLI, you will be able to:

For cost consideration, we may be interested in hosting our websites on a Linux infrastructure. With cloud possibilities, we can consider hosting a Linux VM with ASP.NET Core capabilities.

For this recipe, we will use Ubuntu 17.10, but you can use a different Linux distribution such as Debian, CentOS, Fedora or any Linux distribution that supports a Docker Engine.

Before .NET Core, there was the Mono Framework (http://www.mono-project.com/) to run a .NET application on Linux. Mono is an open source and a cross-platform port of the .NET Framework, which contains an Apache module to host ASP.NET applications.

For now, .NET applications always need Mono to run on Linux or OS X, because not all the BCL (The .NET Framework base class library) is fully ported on Linux.

To host our ASP.NET Core 2.0 application on Linux, we will use Kestrel (you can read more about this at https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer) as a WebServer, which is a lightweight cross-platform web server able to execute ASP.NET Core code. Kestrel uses Libuv internally as a multi-platform asynchronous IO and TCP library, also used by Node.js.

For the moment, there's no other web server we could use to host ASP.NET Core applications on Linux or macOS, and Kestrel is not production-ready. We can also use IIS or WebListener as a web server to host ASP.NET Core applications, but exclusively on Windows.

After installing .NET Core on Linux, creating a new project is easy.

Let's start creating a new project:

The dotnet CLI will generate all the necessary files you need for the project template we select.

The dotnet run command will be used to launch the ASP.NET Core MVC project:

We also have the option to use Docker to create, host, and publish an ASP.NET Core MVC application on Linux. Docker is a piece of operating system and software you will use to run your applications as a server (generally used as a VM locally, or in the cloud). We use Docker Containers as a lightweight VM with only the necessary files (system, tools, runtime, libraries, and code) for running applications, which starts much more quickly and runs independently from the environment it evaluates.

In our recipe, we will locally create a Docker Container with a Linux Ubuntu 17.10 VM to publish and host our ASP.NET Core MVC application.

In this recipe, we will do the following:

$ apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal 

$ killall nautilus && nautilus

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 36A1D7869245C8950F966E92D8576A8BA88D21E9 

$ sudo sh -c "echo deb https://get.docker.com/ubuntu docker main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list" 

$ sudo apt-get update 

$ sudo apt-get install lxc-docker 

$ sudo usermod -aG docker  

$ sudo service docker restart

# This code will download and use the last ASP.NET 5 Docker 
 # image based on Mono at 
 # https://github.com/aspnet/aspnet-docker/blob/master/1.0.0-
 # rc1-update1/Dockerfile

FROM Microsoft/aspnet:latest 

# This code copies the project into the folder and restores 
 # the packages using dotnet CLICOPY . /app
 WORKDIR /app
 RUN ["dotnet","restore"] 

# Open this port in the container 
EXPOSE 5000 

# Start application using DNX and the command from 
 # project.json to call kestrel 
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet","run"] 

$ sudo docker images

$ docker ps

$ docker build -t 

$ docker run -t -d -p 5004:5004 

A web server usually uses port 80 for web applications, while Kestrel will use port 5000 or 5004. We know that we cannot open ports lower than 1024 with default user permissions on Linux. To host ASP.NET Core applications using port 80, and to be production-ready on Linux, we will have to use Nginx with Kestrel to bring us all the web server features we need that Kestrel doesn't have, like load balancing, caching, and security, among others.

We can think of Docker Container as a mini VM with the minimum OS and software components you need to run the applications, isolated from the other application containers. Docker is lightweight, open, and secure, isolating applications from each other. You can consult the Docker documentation at https://www.docker.com/.

We can create a Docker Container on Windows, macOS, Linux (Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse, Arch, Debian, and so on), and on the cloud (Azure, AWS, Google, and so on). It will generally run on Linux distributions, but Windows will also support it.

Because macOS is based on Unix, it is possible to run a .NET application on it with the Mono project. As mentioned in the previous recipe, for the moment, .NET application needs Mono to run on Linux or macOS.

To install Mono, we use Homebrew (http://brew.sh/), which is a package manager for macOS.

In this recipe, we will do the following:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" 

$ brew tap aspnet/dnx 

$ brew update 

$ brew install dnvm 

$ source dnvm.sh

$ brew install node

$ node -v 

$ npm -v

The version currently being used will be displayed on your screen as follows:

$ npm install -g yo gulp 

$ npm install -g generator-aspnet

$ dotnet run

After executing the preceding command you get the following output at localhost:5000:

We will use Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, and create a web application using the ASP.NET Core templates in Visual Studio.

In the preceding screenshot, we can see a preview of the deployed files.

In the preceding screenshot, we can see the result of the build and the publishing in the output window.

In the following screenshot, we can see how our web application deployed on Azure:

Take a look at the screenshot below. We can see the publish settings for the web application in the PublishProfiles folder as one .pubxml file.

We can publish the following applications to the Azure platform:

Azure makes it very easy to deploy and run web-based applications.