Thursday, 7 March, 2019 UTC
Summary
In a previous opinion, we looked at the responsibilities of the Startup class in ASP.NET Core. A consistent problem I run across in code reviews is the amount of code that gravitates into the Startup class, making the entire file cluttered and not well factored.
We’ll look at a variety of solutions to declutter
Startup.cs, but let’s start with a simple task. Once we agree that the Startup class is only responsible for service configuration and middleware, we should move other code out of Startup and into Program.cs where the Main entry point lives. Ironically, it is the .NET Core templates that I believe encourage cluttered and mismatched code inside of Startup.cs, but Microsoft has been improving these templates with each release. For example, here’s the startup code generated by dotnet new in 1.1.public Startup(IHostingEnvironment env) { var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder() .SetBasePath(env.ContentRootPath) .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json") .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true) .AddEnvironmentVariables(); Configuration = builder.Build(); } // ... public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory) { loggerFactory.AddConsole(Configuration.GetSection("Logging")); loggerFactory.AddDebug(); // ... } Notice how the code is configuring the configuration system in the constructor, and is configuring the logging settings in the method responsible for installing middleware. New templates in 2.1 remove these bits of code. Some of the code has moved into
WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder, but even if you need custom settings for configuration or logging, I’d suggest keeping the code out of Startup, and place the code into Program.cs instead.As an example, here’s what Program.cs could look like, if it took on configuration and logging settings.
public static IWebHostBuilder CreateWebHostBuilder(string[] args) => WebHost .CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureAppConfiguration((hostingContext, config) => { var env = hostingContext.HostingEnvironment; config.AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: true, reloadOnChange: true); // ... }) .ConfigureLogging((hostingContext, logging) => { logging.AddConfiguration(hostingContext.Configuration.GetSection("Logging")); logging.AddConsole(); // ... }) .UseStartup<Startup>(); Look at extension methods for
IWebHostBuilder and see what else you can move into Program.cs. In the next opinion post, we’ll talk about techniques for getting rid of the other clutter in the Configure* methods of Startup.