In this tutorial we will learn about the blazing fast web framework ever ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS) and see how to implement a Minimal web API.

Getting started with Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS)


<UL><LI>Post author:</LI><LI>Reading time:13 mins read</LI></UL>In this tutorial we will learn about the blazing fast web framework ever ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS) and see how to implement a Minimal web API.<figure><img width="1024" height="576" alt="Getting started with Minimal web API Using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 - TutLinks" src="https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-1024x576.jpg" srcset="https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-300x169.jpg 300w, https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-768x432.jpg 768w, https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Getting-started-with-Minimal-web-API-Using-ASP.NET-Core-for-.NET-6-TutLinks-2048x1152.jpg 2048w"><figcaption dir="auto">Getting started with Minimal web API Using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 – TutLinks</figcaption></figure><div>
							Table Of Contents						</div><h2>Introduction</h2>ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is an open source framework to build powerful and blazing fast web-based applications that comprise front-end UI as well as back-end services. ASP.NET Core by default ships with Kestrel server. Kestrel server is a cross-platform web server that enables you build modern ASP.NET Core applications with support for HTTPS, HTTP/2 (except on macOS), WebSockets and Unix sockets.<h2>Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 (LTS)</h2>The traditional way of implementing RESTful APIs in .NET WebAPI involve using controllers, a whole lot of bloated dependencies, un-necessarily large list of files and a humongous code base just to implement a simple endpoint with a plain text response.The Minimal web API removes all these hassles, thus offering<UL><LI>the least possible minimum number of files</LI><LI>the minimal dependencies</LI><LI>to the point features which you can extend on a need-to-needs basis</LI></UL>The Minimal web API is best suited for quick implementation of microservice using ASP.NET Core. If you take a peek at the source code, the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Builder_pattern" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">Builder Pattern</a>, is heavily used in&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplicationBuilder</code>&nbsp;and multiple other places. The builder pattern is used all across the places such as to build services, configuration, environment to mention a few in ASP.NET Core.We will see why we should choose ASP.NET core for implementing a microservice in the next section.<h2>A sneak peek at the performance benchmarks of ASP.NET Core</h2>The performance of ASP.NET Core WebAPI is blazing fast. As per the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techempower.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">techempower</a>&nbsp;benchmarks, ASP.NET Core stood next to&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/S-YOU/pico.v" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">pico.v</a>&nbsp;in terms of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&amp;hw=ph&amp;test=plaintext" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">Plaintext responses</a>.<figure><img width="1024" height="530" alt="Best plaintext responses per second, Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE - TutLinks" src="https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/02-Best-plaintext-responses-per-second-Dell-R440-Xeon-Gold-10-GbE-TutLinks-1024x530.png"><figcaption dir="auto">Best plaintext responses per second, Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE – TutLinks</figcaption></figure>In the category of web frameworks that perform at least a single query to database, the <a href="https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&amp;hw=ph&amp;test=db&amp;l=zik0sd-sf" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">benchmarks</a> show that ASP.NET Core has got its major share in the list of Best performance web frameworks.<figure><img width="1024" height="546" alt="Best database-access responses per second, single query, Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE - TutLinks" src="https://www.tutlinks.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/03-Best-database-access-responses-per-second-single-query-Dell-R440-Xeon-Gold-10-GbE-TutLinks-1024x546.png"><figcaption dir="auto">Best database-access responses per second, single query, Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE – TutLinks</figcaption></figure>If you are looking to build a high-performance web application for next billion users, ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is the go-to web framework of your choice.Both the aforementioned benchmarks were obtained from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.techempower.com/" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">techempower</a>&nbsp;website. According to the source, these benchmarks were taken for a web application written using ASP.NET Core running on <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/servers/kestrel?view=aspnetcore-6.0" data-type="URL" data-id="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/servers/kestrel?view=aspnetcore-6.0" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">Kestrel web server</a> on Linux. The physical hardware used to benchmark performance is&nbsp;Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE.<h2>Prerequisites</h2>In order to follow along with this tutorial, it is recommended having the following list of tools and software installed on your PC.<UL><LI>Admin privileges to the PC to install software</LI><LI>Access to a command-line terminal</LI><LI>You need at least&nbsp;<a href="https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/6.0" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">.NET SDK 6.0.100</a>&nbsp;LTS or the latest installed on your PC</LI><LI>Either of the following IDEs which are free to download and install</LI><LI><a href="https://www.postman.com/downloads/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.postman.com/downloads/" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">Postman</a> or any REST Client</LI><LI>Basic knowledge of computer programming</LI></UL>This tutorial will use VS Code, a light-weight IDE compared to Visual Studio 2022. With the aforementioned prerequisites in place, we will proceed and start creating a .NET 6 Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core.<h2>Create a new Minimal web API</h2>We will start by creating a project wherein we will add all the logic for our RESTful API. To start with, open the command line terminal and check for the version of .NET as follows.<div>Shell</div><div>1</div><PRE>dotnet --version</PRE>You should see&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">6.0.100</code>&nbsp;or the latest in order to be able to proceed implementing minimal web API. Now, run the following command to create a new Minimal web API project with&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">-minimal</code>&nbsp;argument as shown.<div>Shell</div><div>1</div><PRE>dotnet new webapi -minimal -o NotesMinimalAPI</PRE>The argument&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">-o</code>&nbsp;accepts the string to indicate the name of the project. In this case it will be&nbsp;NotesMinimlAPI. After the command has run successfully, you should see a new directory created with the name&nbsp;NotesMinimalAPI.To speed things up, we will proceed to launch this project in VS Code by running the commands from the terminal shown as follows.<div>Shell</div><div>5</div><PRE>​</PRE><div>6</div><PRE>await app.RunAsync();</PRE>That’s it! In&nbsp;just 4 lines, you built your first ever Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.<UL><LI>In the preceding code, the static method&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">CreateBuilder</code>&nbsp;of the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplication</code>&nbsp;class accepts the magic variable&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">args</code>&nbsp;that holds an array of arguments. The&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">args</code>&nbsp;is populated from the list of arguments if any that are provided during the command to run this application. Also, the <code dir="ltr">CreateBuilder</code>&nbsp;method returns the instance of the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplicationBuilder</code>&nbsp;class.</LI><LI>The&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">Build</code>&nbsp;method returns the instance of&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplication</code>&nbsp;configured by the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplicationBuilder</code>. This is held in the&nbsp;app&nbsp;variable. Using the instance of&nbsp;app, you will have access to functionalities that allow you to manage ServiceProvider, Configuration, Logger, access Urls and a bunch of other stuff to contrive the behavior of a web application.</LI><LI>On the instance of configured&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">WebApplication</code>&nbsp;which is referred by the variable&nbsp;app&nbsp;will expose functionality to build endpoint routes and various other methods that help build the application.<UL><LI>For example, to implement a simple&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">GET</code>&nbsp;endpoint that returns a plain text message, we use the extension method&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">MapGet</code>&nbsp;available on&nbsp;app&nbsp;as follows:</LI></UL></LI></UL><div>C#</div><UL><LI>Finally, we are running our web application asynchronously using the command&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">await app.RunAsync();</code>.</LI></UL>We will proceed to learn how to run our simple but minimal web API and see it in action.<h2>Run Minimal web API</h2>As we have built the basic Minimal web API, it is time for us to learn how to run and interact with WebAPI.<UL><LI>Open the built-in terminal in VS Code by navigating to the menu&nbsp;Terminal&nbsp;-&gt;&nbsp;New Terminal.</LI><LI>From the command line terminal, navigate to the root directory of this project and run the following command.</LI></UL><div>Shell</div><div>1</div><PRE>dotnet run</PRE>The preceding command builds and then runs the application. You will see the output that shows up something as follows.<div>Plain Text</div><div>11</div><PRE> Content root path: E:\NotesMinimalAPI\</PRE>You will notice that the output will show two URLs, one with&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">http</code>&nbsp;and another with&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">https</code>. Using either of these urls, you will be able to interact with the API.We also notice that the ports are randomly chosen based on the availability. In our case, the port&nbsp;7057&nbsp;is chosen automatically for the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">https</code>&nbsp;instance and the port&nbsp;5250&nbsp;are chosen automatically for the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">http</code>&nbsp;instance of the web application&nbsp;when you created a new project. You will find these port numbers under profiles section with the key for applicationUrl of Properties\launchSettings.json file.In the next section, we will learn how to configure ports for http and&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">https</code>&nbsp;instances of our application.<h2>Port Configuration</h2>We learnt that the web API runs on randomly chosen ports in the previous section. But you can choose the ports of your choice instead of the web application to randomly choose them. You can configure the web application to run on specified ports in the following ways.<UL><LI>Setting the port configuration programmatically using&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">app.Urls.Add</code>&nbsp;method.</LI><LI>Adding Kestrel endpoint configuration in the&nbsp;appsettings.json.</LI><LI>Setting the port configuration from the command line argument&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">--urls</code>&nbsp;while running the app.</LI></UL>We will see each of the approaches and learn how to set ports 5000 for <code dir="ltr">http </code>and 5001 for <code dir="ltr">https</code> instance of the application.You can also do url and port configuration using&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">ASPNETCORE_URLS</code>&nbsp;<a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/configuration/?view=aspnetcore-6.0#environment-variables" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">environment variable</a>&nbsp;or by adding <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/configuration/?view=aspnetcore-6.0#environment-variables-set-in-generated-launchsettingsjson" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr"><code dir="ltr">applicationUrl</code> in launchSettings.json&nbsp;file</a>. You can refer to this official documentation for more alternatives.Before you proceed, ensure that the ports that you specify are free. This means to ensure that no other application already runs on these ports. We will use 5000&nbsp;and&nbsp;5001&nbsp;for this tutorial. Also, it is recommended to follow any one of the three approaches mentioned for port configuration in this section.<h3>Port Configuration programmatically</h3>To set the port configuration programmatically, add the following lines to the&nbsp;Program.cs&nbsp;just before you call&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">app.RunAsync()</code>&nbsp;as follows.<div>C#</div><div>2</div><PRE>builder.Logging.AddJsonConsole();</PRE>The other logging formats can be invoked using&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">AddSimpleConsole</code>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">AddSystemdConsole</code>&nbsp;methods.The default logging mechanism is <code dir="ltr">AddSimpleConsole</code> in ASP.NET Core. You can also add application logs to NoSQL logging tools such as Logstash or Splunk or be it any&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series_database" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">TSDB</a>&nbsp;(Time Series databases) such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb/" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">InfluxDB</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://prometheus.io/" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">Prometheus</a>. This can be done by using middleware using the <code dir="ltr">app.UseMiddleware</code> method.We will now learn to see how to generate swagger spec for our ASP.NET Core 6 Minimal web API in the next section.<h2>Adding Swagger Specification</h2>As we are implementing a RESTful interface, we would like the consumers of our API to know how to use it. For such scenarios, APIs generally have specification documents often termed OAS (openAPI specification) or Swagger specification.The file specification comes in JSON format and is named swagger.json. The name swagger is an old-school name of the OpenAPI specification. ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 with the help of package <code dir="ltr">Swashbuckle.AspNetCore</code> comes with the capability to auto-generate the Swagger spec for your RESTful application.Using the command-line, navigate to the root of your project and run the following command to install <code dir="ltr">Swashbuckle.AspNetCore</code>.<div>Shell</div><div>18</div><PRE>​</PRE><div>19</div><PRE>app.Run();</PRE>From the preceding code, we notice that the builder is adding services by invoking the methods <code dir="ltr">AddEndpointsApiExplorer</code> and <code dir="ltr">AddSwaggerGen</code>. Also, we want this Swagger spec to be available for development purposes only. So we generate&nbsp;swagger.json&nbsp;file only when the application is running in development mode. This is controlled in the&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">if</code>&nbsp;block with the condition <code dir="ltr">app.Environment.IsDevelopment()</code>.Visit url&nbsp;<code dir="ltr"><a href="https://localhost:5001/swagger" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">https://localhost:5001/swagger</a></code>&nbsp;or <code dir="ltr"><a href="http://localhost:5000/swagger/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" dir="ltr">http://localhost:5000/swagger</a></code> and you should see the swagger spec for our RESTful application implemented so far.<h2>Enable Hot reload</h2>During the development, we might have multiple code changes coming along our way. In such cases it becomes tedious to kill and re-run the .NET application every time.With .NET 6, you have the hot reload feature with which you can edit and continue to see your changes automatically reflected in your application.To enable hot reload, run the following command.<div>Shell</div><div>1</div><PRE>dotnet watch run</PRE>Before you run in watch mode that enables hot reload, I recommend you to stop the application if it is already running by using&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">Ctrl+C</code>&nbsp;keys. A list of supported edits that reflect when your application running in hot reload mode can be seen&nbsp;<a href="https://aka.ms/dotnet/hot-reload" rel="noreferrer noopener" dir="ltr">here</a>.At any point in time if you want to restart the application, you have to hit&nbsp;<code dir="ltr">Ctrl+R</code>&nbsp;to restart the application back again in hot reload mode.<h2>Summary</h2>In this tutorial, we learnt brief introduction to ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 LTS. We then learnt the motivation for using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 to implement Minimal web API for your next billion customers by going through benchmarks. We then started by installing prerequisites. We then created our first Minimal web API. We also covered how to configure our Minimal web API to run on Port our our choice using various Port configurations. We then saw how to add JSON logging, Swagger a.k.a OpenAPI specification to our Minimal web API. We then learn how to enable Hot reload for our Minimal web API to watch the changes in real-time as we make changes to our code base.Having set up the web application and its aesthetics, we will now proceed to learn how to implement CRUD based on RESTful endpoints using Minimal web API in the next blog post.If you like this tutorial, please do bookmark 🔖 (Ctrl +D) it and spread the word 📢 by sharing it across your friends and colleagues.

The traditional way of implementing RESTful APIs in .NET WebAPI involve using controllers, a whole lot of bloated dependencies, un-necessarily large list of files and a humongous code base just to implement a simple endpoint with a plain text response.

In this tutorial we will learn about the blazing fast web framework ever ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS) and see how to implement a Minimal web API.

computerscience

Computer Science

<ul><li>Post author: </li><li>Reading time: 13 mins read </li> </ul>

In this tutorial we will learn about the blazing fast web framework ever ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS) and see how to implement a Minimal web API.

ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is an open source framework to build powerful and blazing fast web-based applications that comprise front-end UI as well as back-end services. ASP.NET Core by default ships with Kestrel server. Kestrel server is a cross-platform web server that enables you build modern ASP.NET Core applications with support for HTTPS, HTTP/2 (except on macOS), WebSockets and Unix sockets.

Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 (LTS)

The traditional way of implementing RESTful APIs in .NET WebAPI involve using controllers, a whole lot of bloated dependencies, un-necessarily large list of files and a humongous code base just to implement a simple endpoint with a plain text response.

The Minimal web API removes all these hassles, thus offering

<ul><li>the least possible minimum number of files </li><li>the minimal dependencies </li><li>to the point features which you can extend on a need-to-needs basis </li> </ul>

The Minimal web API is best suited for quick implementation of microservice using ASP.NET Core. If you take a peek at the source code, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Builder_pattern">Builder Pattern </a>, is heavily used in <code>WebApplicationBuilder </code> and multiple other places. The builder pattern is used all across the places such as to build services, configuration, environment to mention a few in ASP.NET Core.

We will see why we should choose ASP.NET core for implementing a microservice in the next section.

A sneak peek at the performance benchmarks of ASP.NET Core

The performance of ASP.NET Core WebAPI is blazing fast. As per the <a href="https://www.techempower.com/">techempower </a> benchmarks, ASP.NET Core stood next to <a href="https://github.com/S-YOU/pico.v">pico.v </a> in terms of <a href="https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=ph&test=plaintext">Plaintext responses </a>.

In the category of web frameworks that perform at least a single query to database, the <a href="https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=ph&test=db&l=zik0sd-sf">benchmarks </a>show that ASP.NET Core has got its major share in the list of Best performance web frameworks.

If you are looking to build a high-performance web application for next billion users, ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 is the go-to web framework of your choice.

Both the aforementioned benchmarks were obtained from <a href="https://www.techempower.com/">techempower </a> website. According to the source, these benchmarks were taken for a web application written using ASP.NET Core running on <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/servers/kestrel?view=aspnetcore-6.0">Kestrel web server </a>on Linux. The physical hardware used to benchmark performance is Dell R440 Xeon Gold + 10 GbE .

In order to follow along with this tutorial, it is recommended having the following list of tools and software installed on your PC.

<ul><li>Admin privileges to the PC to install software </li><li>Access to a command-line terminal </li><li>You need at least <a href="https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/6.0">.NET SDK 6.0.100 </a> LTS or the latest installed on your PC </li><li>Either of the following IDEs which are free to download and install </li><li><a href="https://www.postman.com/downloads/">Postman </a>or any REST Client </li><li>Basic knowledge of computer programming </li> </ul>

This tutorial will use VS Code, a light-weight IDE compared to Visual Studio 2022. With the aforementioned prerequisites in place, we will proceed and start creating a .NET 6 Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core.

We will start by creating a project wherein we will add all the logic for our RESTful API. To start with, open the command line terminal and check for the version of .NET as follows.

You should see <code>6.0.100 </code> or the latest in order to be able to proceed implementing minimal web API. Now, run the following command to create a new Minimal web API project with <code>-minimal </code> argument as shown.

The argument <code>-o </code> accepts the string to indicate the name of the project. In this case it will be NotesMinimlAPI . After the command has run successfully, you should see a new directory created with the name NotesMinimalAPI .

To speed things up, we will proceed to launch this project in VS Code by running the commands from the terminal shown as follows.

That’s it! In just 4 lines , you built your first ever Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.

<ul><li>In the preceding code, the static method <code>CreateBuilder </code> of the <code>WebApplication </code> class accepts the magic variable <code>args </code> that holds an array of arguments. The <code>args </code> is populated from the list of arguments if any that are provided during the command to run this application. Also, the <code>CreateBuilder </code> method returns the instance of the <code>WebApplicationBuilder </code> class. </li><li>The <code>Build </code> method returns the instance of <code>WebApplication </code> configured by the <code>WebApplicationBuilder </code>. This is held in the app  variable. Using the instance of app , you will have access to functionalities that allow you to manage ServiceProvider, Configuration, Logger, access Urls and a bunch of other stuff to contrive the behavior of a web application. </li><li>On the instance of configured <code>WebApplication </code> which is referred by the variable app  will expose functionality to build endpoint routes and various other methods that help build the application.<ul><li>For example, to implement a simple <code>GET </code> endpoint that returns a plain text message, we use the extension method <code>MapGet </code> available on app  as follows: </li> </ul> </li> </ul>

<ul><li>Finally, we are running our web application asynchronously using the command <code>await app.RunAsync(); </code>. </li> </ul>

We will proceed to learn how to run our simple but minimal web API and see it in action.

As we have built the basic Minimal web API, it is time for us to learn how to run and interact with WebAPI.

<ul><li>Open the built-in terminal in VS Code by navigating to the menu Terminal  -> New Terminal . </li><li>From the command line terminal, navigate to the root directory of this project and run the following command. </li> </ul>

The preceding command builds and then runs the application. You will see the output that shows up something as follows.

You will notice that the output will show two URLs, one with <code>http </code> and another with <code>https </code>. Using either of these urls, you will be able to interact with the API.

We also notice that the ports are randomly chosen based on the availability. In our case, the port 7057  is chosen automatically for the <code>https </code> instance and the port 5250  are chosen automatically for the <code>http </code> instance of the web application when you created a new project. You will find these port numbers under profiles section with the key for applicationUrl of Properties\launchSettings.json file.

In the next section, we will learn how to configure ports for http and <code>https </code> instances of our application.

We learnt that the web API runs on randomly chosen ports in the previous section. But you can choose the ports of your choice instead of the web application to randomly choose them. You can configure the web application to run on specified ports in the following ways.

<ul><li>Setting the port configuration programmatically using <code>app.Urls.Add </code> method. </li><li>Adding Kestrel endpoint configuration in the appsettings.json . </li><li>Setting the port configuration from the command line argument <code>--urls </code> while running the app. </li> </ul>

We will see each of the approaches and learn how to set ports 5000 for <code>http </code>and 5001 for <code>https </code>instance of the application.

You can also do url and port configuration using <code>ASPNETCORE_URLS </code> <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/configuration/?view=aspnetcore-6.0#environment-variables">environment variable </a> or by adding <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/configuration/?view=aspnetcore-6.0#environment-variables-set-in-generated-launchsettingsjson"><code>applicationUrl </code>in launchSettings.json  file </a>. You can refer to this official documentation for more alternatives.

Before you proceed, ensure that the ports that you specify are free. This means to ensure that no other application already runs on these ports. We will use 5000  and 5001  for this tutorial. Also, it is recommended to follow any one of the three approaches mentioned for port configuration in this section.

To set the port configuration programmatically, add the following lines to the Program.cs  just before you call <code>app.RunAsync() </code> as follows.

The other logging formats can be invoked using <code>AddSimpleConsole </code> and <code>AddSystemdConsole </code> methods.

The default logging mechanism is <code>AddSimpleConsole </code>in ASP.NET Core. You can also add application logs to NoSQL logging tools such as Logstash or Splunk or be it any <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series_database">TSDB </a> (Time Series databases) such as <a href="https://www.influxdata.com/products/influxdb/">InfluxDB </a> or <a href="https://prometheus.io/">Prometheus </a>. This can be done by using middleware using the <code>app.UseMiddleware </code>method.

We will now learn to see how to generate swagger spec for our ASP.NET Core 6 Minimal web API in the next section.

As we are implementing a RESTful interface, we would like the consumers of our API to know how to use it. For such scenarios, APIs generally have specification documents often termed OAS (openAPI specification) or Swagger specification.

The file specification comes in JSON format and is named swagger.json . The name swagger is an old-school name of the OpenAPI specification. ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 with the help of package <code>Swashbuckle.AspNetCore </code>comes with the capability to auto-generate the Swagger spec for your RESTful application.

Using the command-line, navigate to the root of your project and run the following command to install <code>Swashbuckle.AspNetCore </code>.

From the preceding code, we notice that the builder is adding services by invoking the methods <code>AddEndpointsApiExplorer </code>and <code>AddSwaggerGen </code>. Also, we want this Swagger spec to be available for development purposes only. So we generate swagger.json  file only when the application is running in development mode. This is controlled in the <code>if </code> block with the condition <code>app.Environment.IsDevelopment() </code>.

Visit url <code><a href="https://localhost:5001/swagger">https://localhost:5001/swagger </a> </code> or <code><a href="http://localhost:5000/swagger/">http://localhost:5000/swagger </a> </code>and you should see the swagger spec for our RESTful application implemented so far.

During the development, we might have multiple code changes coming along our way. In such cases it becomes tedious to kill and re-run the .NET application every time.

With .NET 6, you have the hot reload feature with which you can edit and continue to see your changes automatically reflected in your application.

To enable hot reload, run the following command.

Before you run in watch mode that enables hot reload, I recommend you to stop the application if it is already running by using <code>Ctrl+C </code> keys. A list of supported edits that reflect when your application running in hot reload mode can be seen <a href="https://aka.ms/dotnet/hot-reload">here </a>.

At any point in time if you want to restart the application, you have to hit <code>Ctrl+R </code> to restart the application back again in hot reload mode.

In this tutorial, we learnt brief introduction to ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 LTS. We then learnt the motivation for using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6 to implement Minimal web API for your next billion customers by going through benchmarks.

We then started by installing prerequisites. We then created our first Minimal web API. We also covered how to configure our Minimal web API to run on Port our our choice using various Port configurations. We then saw how to add JSON logging, Swagger a.k.a OpenAPI specification to our Minimal web API. We then learn how to enable Hot reload for our Minimal web API to watch the changes in real-time as we make changes to our code base.

Having set up the web application and its aesthetics, we will now proceed to learn how to implement CRUD based on RESTful endpoints using Minimal web API in the next blog post.

If you like this tutorial, please do bookmark 🔖 (Ctrl +D) it and spread the word 📢 by sharing it across your friends and colleagues.

Getting started with Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS) - TutLinks

Getting started with Minimal web API using ASP.NET Core for .NET 6.0 (LTS)

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