AspireRunner.AspNetCore 1.1.4

AspireRunner.AspNetCore

A library for running the Aspire Dashboard alongside ASP.NET Core apps (as a background service).

The dashboard can display OpenTelemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) from any application, although this is intended to be used for local development only.

Example usage

using AspireRunner.AspNetCore;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// ...

if (builder.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
    builder.Services.AddAspireDashboard(config => {
        config.Otlp.EndpointUrl = "https://localhost:33554";

        // Or bind from configuration (appsettings.json, etc)
        builder.Configuration.GetSection("AspireDashboard").Bind(config);
    });
}

//...

var app = builder.Build();

//...

[!NOTE] The runner will prioritize using the dashboard bundled with the Aspire workload, if it's installed.

[!IMPORTANT] While the runner itself targets .NET 6 (and later), the dashboard requires the .NET 8/9 runtime to run.

Meaning that the runner can be used as part of a .NET 6 application, but you'll still need the .NET 8/9 runtime to run the dashboard.

Configuration

The runner can be configured with the AspireDashboardOptions class, which contains a subset of the options supported by the Aspire dashboard, but also has runner-specific options under the Runner property:

• PipeOutput (bool): When enabled, the runner will pipe the output of the dashboard process to the logger.
• LaunchBrowser (bool): When enabled, the runner will attempt to launch the dashboard in the default browser on startup.
• SingleInstanceHandling (enum): Controls how the runner should handle multiple instances of the dashboard process:
  1. WarnAndExit: Logs a warning and exits if an existing instance is found.
  2. Ignore: Disables checking for running instances of the Aspire Dashboard. Note that new instances will fail to start if an existing one is using the same port
  3. ReplaceExisting: Kills any existing instance before starting a new one.
• AutoDownload (bool): When enabled, the runner will automatically download the dashboard if the Aspire workload is not found.
• RuntimeVersion (string): The version of the .NET runtime to use when running the dashboard. (ex: When setting the runtime version to 8.0, the latest 8.x version of the dashboard will be downloaded/used)