aspire

name

aspire

description

.NET Aspire for cloud-native orchestration. Covers AppHost configuration, service defaults, resource configuration, service discovery, and the Aspire dashboard. Load this skill when setting up local development orchestration, service discovery, or Aspire-managed infrastructure, or when the user mentions "Aspire", "AppHost", "service defaults", "service discovery", "orchestration", "Aspire dashboard", "AddProject", "WithReference", or "cloud-native .NET".

.NET Aspire

Core Principles

1. Aspire is for orchestration, not deployment — Aspire manages your local development experience: starting services, databases, and message brokers together. Production deployment is a separate concern.
2. Service defaults are your baseline — The ServiceDefaults project configures OpenTelemetry, health checks, and resilience for all services in one place.
3. Use Aspire integrations — Aspire has built-in integrations for PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, SQL Server, and more. They handle connection strings, health checks, and tracing automatically.
4. The dashboard is your observability tool — Use the Aspire dashboard for local development tracing, logging, and metrics instead of setting up Seq/Grafana locally.

Patterns

AppHost Configuration

// AppHost/Program.cs
var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Infrastructure resources
var postgres = builder.AddPostgres("postgres")
    .WithPgAdmin()
    .AddDatabase("myappdb");

var redis = builder.AddRedis("redis")
    .WithRedisInsight();

var rabbitmq = builder.AddRabbitMQ()
    .WithManagementPlugin();


 api = builder.AddProject<Projects.MyApp_Api>()
    .WithReference(postgres)
    .WithReference(redis)
    .WithReference(rabbitmq)
    .WithExternalHttpEndpoints();

 worker = builder.AddProject<Projects.MyApp_Worker>()
    .WithReference(postgres)
    .WithReference(rabbitmq);

builder.Build().Run();