If you’re anything like me, you constantly are finding more and more tasks that require your attention.

To make matters worse, the industry definition of “DevOps” is still evolving itself, quickly becoming ubiquitous with “a litle bit of everything” in the process.

Like a breath of fresh air, ZEIT is a cloud service that allows near-mindless deployment of javascript & node.js apps. Much thanks probably also belongs to Scott Hanselman and his ever-tinkering soul who published “ZEIT now deployments of open source ASP.NET Core web apps with Docker” yesterday and I was immediately intrigued. Since Zeit Now supports Docker, then why not .NET Core?

In the blog post, Scott (with help from friend Glenn Condron) walks you through from creating a fresh ASP.NET Core Web App using the dotnet cli. Next, it is almost embarassingly simple to see him

• run a dotnet restore
• create a valid Dockerfile
• dotnet publish
• ensure your project outputs are in the right directory
• type now command down in your publish folder

And that’s it. You now have a live URL on your clipboard–this is the DNS assigned to the Docker container that is running in the cloud for you. As I poked around the Zeit Now app & documentation I also found some really cool features like single click “file sharing” in the form of deploying a container with your file.

The number of technically savvy people available in my vicinity has been reduced, yet in the mid-to-long term here we do expect to have a significant software microservices architecture deployment. That said, it is in my best interest to begin finding and familiarizing myself with the absolute simplest tools and procedures in order to put them into place and avoid some of the DevOps minefield that a team can find itself on when it is unfamiliar with the options available.

Zeit Now seems like a fantastic service to fit many of our needs. My test was then to see if this was as simple & easy for me as it seemed to be for Mr. Hanselman. One main difference between my project and Scott’s here as well: I am not using the barebones ASP.NET MVC template. Instead, I took a functioning NancyFX example API/website, still using project.json structure instead of MSBuild as well, generated the Dockerfile and after adding a few items under our include in publishOptions…

I wanted to know if this was going to work with my existing NancyFX services and/or if there were any extra gotcha’s or things to know. As a jumpstart, the easiest thing to do was simply clone my VSNancyDemo repository from GitHub.

The repository is public so feel free to clone the project as well if you’d like to follow along or try out your ZEIT Now with something a little different or pull in any project of your own!

Lines added to project.json (to ensure required files copy to publish dir)

  "publishOptions": {
    "include": [
      "wwwroot",
      "web.config",
      "appsettings.json",
      "Content",
      "Dockerfile",
      "views"
    ]
  }

I noticed if some of the above were missing, there would be some issues. For instance, before I added the "views" folder, I was getting a 500 Error from Nancy as if the index.html did not exist. Rightfully so, as in the container environment that ZEIT deployed the folder with views was not copied.

Dockerfile

FROM microsoft/aspnetcore
LABEL name="DispoStatsService"
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "DispoStatsService.dll"]
ARG source=.
WORKDIR /app
EXPOSE 80
COPY $source .

Easy as pie.

So as to not be repetetive, I’ll pick up here after the dotnet publish

You can see at the very end here I ran the now command inside the folder dotnet cli published to. When it is done there, your app is deployed and running in a container. The URL (since it’s a little long and auto-generated) gets automatically copied to your clipboard.

I wanted to go ahead and also get custom domain names working as Zeit.co seemed to make doing so extremely easy. See the cli output, deployment and alias assignment below:

Lo’ and behold, I have my NancyFX 2.0-clinteastwood sample app running on Docker in the cloud using https://zeit.co. The container may be reached using either the alias I assigned, https://umgdss.nt-x.com, or the original address, https://dispostatsservice-wjpwcfkfcq.now.sh/. While we are admiring the shiny tool: see how it also auto-issued SSL certificate for the alias domain.

Another cool thing about this sample application is some of the very basic routes and functions incorporate some framework bits, like the dependency injection container, so we can be confident parts of the app were tested/working early on.

For example, as shown below, my Home / Route returns an index.html with whatever Greeting is in appsettings.json and the /test/ route right next to it does the same, but returns plain text with no web page. This is helpful, for instance, in how it helped me realize the /views/ folder was not in the publish path. The final 2 browsers simply show a sample AsyncModule with some of the possibilities using the built-in request pipelines and last but not least: the /os/ route!

Don’t let the code for this overwhelm you, ok?

   Get("/os", x =>
    {
       return System.Runtime.InteropServices.RuntimeInformation.OSDescription;
    });

I find this one particularly cool because it works no matter where or how you are hosting your NancyFX app, the route will return what operating system the host is running. Here on this cloud provider the app is aware of itself being hosted on Linux 4.7.0-coreos which sounds more like a kernel version (container) to me.

Here is the exact same app again, but debugging locally (ignoring our Dockerfile etc).

Now go on, hack and be Merry.

I hope some part of this was helpful, I personally want to thank Scott Hanselman and Glenn Condron for their tinkering and getting this to work! This has not only helped me overall understand the concept and inner workings with regard to Docker, but it also exposed me to an awesome service & host in ZEIT that I immediately fell in love with!

Now that I’ve completed that diversion–back to writing the core functionality for this API & app I’m supposed to be working on.