AppPipe.Hosting 1.1.0

AppPipe.Hosting 🚀

AppPipe (also known as Open-Aspire) is a lightweight, on-premises alternative to the .NET Aspire dashboard and gateway runner. It is designed to orchestrate, route, and collect telemetry for microservice applications deployed on-premises (such as IIS on Windows or systemd on Linux).

With AppPipe, you get a beautiful, unified developer dashboard and service discovery proxy without the overhead of cloud-only architectures.

🌟 Features

• 📊 OpenTelemetry Collector & Dashboard: Collects OTLP traces, logs, and metrics in-memory from your services. Displays them in a gorgeous Blazor dashboard (complete with Light/Dark modes, trace waterfall flamegraphs, structured console logs, and metric charts).
• 🔀 Unified Gateway & Routing: Powered by YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy), AppPipe hosts a central routing gateway that automatically maps and proxies requests to your backend microservices.
• 🔌 Dynamic Port Allocation: Automatically assigns free ports to your applications during local runs or deployment pipelines, preventing port conflict issues.
• 🏢 Native IIS & systemd Integration: Out-of-the-box deployment module using ModularPipelines that automates publishing, creating AppPools, registering IIS sub-applications, setting environment variables, and handling systemd service setups.
• ⚡ Dual Render Modes (Resource-Optimized):
  • Interactive (WebSocket-based): Real-time, live-updating metrics and traces.
  • SSR (Server-Side Rendered): WebSockets are disabled to minimize CPU and memory footprint, utilizing native forms and base-relative routing. Perfect for production or restricted IIS host environments.

🏛️ Architecture

graph TD
    Client(Browser/Client) -->|HTTP| Gateway

    subgraph User's Application Space
        Backend1[Backend Microservice A]
        Backend2[Backend Microservice B]
    end

    subgraph AppPipe.Hosting NuGet Package
        Gateway[AppPipe Gateway / YARP]
        TelemetryPort[Gateway Telemetry Port]
        Store[In-Memory Telemetry Store]
        Dashboard[Blazor Dashboard UI]
        
        TelemetryPort --> Store
        Store --> Dashboard
    end

    Gateway -->|Service Discovery Routing| Backend1
    Gateway -->|Service Discovery Routing| Backend2
    Backend1 -->|OTLP gRPC| TelemetryPort
    Backend2 -->|OTLP gRPC| TelemetryPort

📦 NuGet Package Setup

AppPipe is published as a NuGet package. You can view the author profile at nuget.org/profiles/sitholewb.

Install the Package

dotnet add package AppPipe.Hosting

🚀 Quick Start

1. Define your App Topology

Configure your services and their relationships in your entry point:

using AppPipe.Hosting;

var builder = AppPipeApp.CreateBuilder(args);

// Define a backend worker microservice
builder.AddProject("BackendWorker", projectPath: "../BackendWorker/BackendWorker.csproj");

// Define a frontend API that communicates with the backend
builder.AddProject("FrontendApi", projectPath: "../FrontendApi/FrontendApi.csproj")
       .WithReference("BackendWorker"); // Service discovery environment variables injected automatically

var app = builder.Build();

// Run the host using DevHostRunner
var runner = new DevHostRunner(app);
await runner.RunAsync();

2. Configure telemetry in your Microservices

In your microservices, register the standard OpenTelemetry exporter. They will automatically detect the telemetry endpoints exposed by the AppPipe Gateway.

builder.Services.AddOpenTelemetry()
    .WithTracing(tracing => tracing
        .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
        .AddHttpClientInstrumentation()
        .AddOtlpExporter()) // Exports to AppPipe telemetry port
    .WithMetrics(metrics => metrics
        .AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation()
        .AddHttpClientInstrumentation()
        .AddOtlpExporter());

🛠️ Configuration

You can customize the dashboard and gateway behavior in your appsettings.json or environment variables:

{
  "Dashboard": {
    "UseWebSockets": false
  }
}

💾 Customizing the Telemetry Database

By default, AppPipe retains telemetry in a circular in-memory buffer (InMemoryTelemetryStore). For production environments, you can plug in any database (such as SQLite, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or ClickHouse) by implementing the ITelemetryStore interface and registering it:

builder.ConfigureGateway(gatewayBuilder =>
{
    gatewayBuilder.Services.AddSingleton<ITelemetryStore, SqliteTelemetryStore>();
});

For complete step-by-step code examples, see the Custom Telemetry Database Configuration Guide.

🏢 On-Premises Deployment

AppPipe includes a built-in deployment module to automate builds and deploy directly to IIS or systemd.

Deploying to IIS (Windows Server)

To deploy the gateway and microservices as sub-applications under a default IIS site:

dotnet run --project YourDevHost.csproj -- deploy /app-pipe-host-test

The pipeline automatically:

1. Stops existing Application Pools to unlock files.
2. Compiles your projects in Release mode.
3. Automatically sets up dedicated AppPools and sub-applications in IIS.
4. Generates unique tokens and environments to authenticate intra-app loopback telemetry safely.
5. Restarts the Application Pools.

👤 Author

Developed and maintained by Welcome Bonginhlahla Sithole (NuGet Profile).

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.