Running dotnet core web application in Ubuntu Core

For a current project I am looking into running a dotnet core web application in Ubuntu Core this does require some extra work compared with running in docker or on bare metal. To illustrate the project I will use a simple dotnet webapi and a fresh install of Ubuntu 17.10 the snap will be deployed and used in the same operating system. In an effort to ensure consistent build we will be using an lxc container for our builds. This makes the process less dependend on operating system, the guide should be usable with only minor adjustments on other linux distros.

Requirements

It is possible to do the entire development process in a continer, however for this purpose i prefer to develop on my active OS and only deploy to a snap. That means that we will need to install dotnet core on our system. The process for this varies slightly depending on your distribution and I will limit this guide to Ubuntu. If you are using another distro Microsoft have documentation on how to install on all supported distributions.

Dotnet Core

The following commands should install dotnet core sdk on a system running Ubuntu 17.04 or 17.10 if you are running an alternative version the Microsoft documentation have repository links for other versions.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.gpg
sudo mv microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.gpg

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/microsoft-ubuntu-zesty-prod zesty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dotnetdev.list'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-2.0.0

LXC containers

To have a clean build environment we need to install and prepare an lxc container. The following commands should install lxc and create a container with dotnet Core sdk and snapcraft tools.

sudo apt-get install -y lxc
sudo lxc launch ubuntu:16.04 snapcraft -c security.privileged=true
sudo lxc config device add snapcraft homedir disk source=/home/$USER path=/home/ubuntu
sleep 5 # wait for container to initilize
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- apt update 
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- apt install -y snapcraft curl
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- sh -c 'curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > /home/ubuntu/microsoft.gpg'
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- sudo mv /home/ubuntu/microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.gpg 
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/microsoft-ubuntu-xenial-prod xenial main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dotnetdev.list'

sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- apt update 
sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- apt install -y dotnet-sdk-2.1.3

The commands in the rest of this project will assume that you have Visual Studio Code installed on your system. If you prefer another editor you can replace all calls to code with your editor of choice.

Project definition and build config

As previusly mentioned we will create a basic webapi and use that as an example for our snap.

The following commands will initialise a basic webapi in the folder dotnetSnap/src it will also create a Makefile and open that in Visual Studio Code.

mkdir -p dotnetSnap/src
cd dotnetSnap/src
dotnet new webapi
touch Makefile
code Makefile

Since snapcraft's make plugin calls make all we need to ensure that make all runs our build step. In this case we want our dotnet project to be published as a self-contained application targeting x64 Ubuntu. After snapcraft runs make all it will run make install which copies the binaries to a folder under bin in the snap.

all: build

build:
    @dotnet publish --self-contained -o bin/publish \
    -c Release --runtime ubuntu.16.04-x64 
install:
    @mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/bin
    @cp -r bin/publish $(DESTDIR)/bin/
clean:
    @rm -rf bin

With our dotnet project ready for deployment we will shift our focus towards Snapcraft. The setup required here is fairly limited and the following commands should create a new snap project in your dotnetSnap folder.

cd ..
snapcraft init
code snap/snapcraft.yaml

The snapcraft defintion needs some minor editing to make it usable for our purpose. Mainly we need to add an app that runs the application which have the default name of src we also need to define a part which include our build step.

We are using the make plugin which calls:

make all
make install

This will compile and publish our project to the snap's binary folder. We also add libunwind8 and libicu55 which are required for the dotnet application to function properly.

Our snapcraft.yaml will look like this:

name: Dotnet_snap # you probably want to 'snapcraft register <name>'
version: '0.1' # just for humans, typically '1.2+git' or '1.3.2'
summary: A simple example snap for dotnet in snaps
description: A simple example snap for dotnet in snaps
grade: devel # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
confinement: devmode # use 'strict' once you have the right plugs and slots

apps:
  testapi:
    command: bin/publish/src

parts:
  testapi:
    plugin: make
    source: src/
    stage-packages:
      - libunwind8
      - libicu55

Building installing and running

When we have configured our application we use the following command to build the project.

sudo lxc exec snapcraft -- sh -c "cd /home/ubuntu/dotnetSnap; snapcraft"

This will create Dotnet_snap_0.1_amd64.snap which can be installed on your system using:

sudo snap install Dotnet_snap_0.1_amd64.snap --devmode

We should now be able to run our api using

sudo Dotnet_snap.testapi

Hopefully this guide have provided some help in running your dotnet core applications in a snap, the code from my project is available on github.