jsteinbe / ansiblevagrantvirtualboxdotnet

This is a Vagrant Box that uses Ansible to install ASP Core onto a Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine.

Ansible/Vagrant DotNet VirtualBox

What is this?

This is a Vagrant Box that uses Ansible to install ASP Core onto a Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine. This is meant as a self-hosting test box for a MVC5/ASP Core to see how well ASP Core works under this new environment and to allow development.

The server is setup to host a very simple MVC ASP Core application taken from Windows/Visual Studio 2015. The application has a simple Controller and View. The simple application that is installed will need to be run as you develop (see Improvements below).

Why?

Historically ASP has been a proprietary software project that runs on Windows boxes exclusively. This has changed recently and now Asp Core is fully open source and compatible with Linux/Mac Os. I am always interested in new technology and wanted to see how it worked. I am excited for the challenge and intrigued at the possibilities. I have always liked the idea of free open source software since any unused machine can be provisioned without licensing restrictions.

How do I use it?

You will want to download the Vagrant box via:

host$ vagrant up

That will download the ~440 MB box (which can take a while). This will also provision the box.

After that you are ready to run the application. Simply:

host$ vagrant ssh         # Login to Vagrant box
guest$ runapp             # Change to Application Directory and Run!

Additionally you can use the goapp command to go into the source directory. dotnet run is the traditional way to run the application however for convenience runapp will do the same thing.

To the host, the application will be available at http://localhost:8000 .

Note: If you change the dependencies in project.json you will need to run dotnet restore.

Improvements

Instead of running dotnet run each time a third party program could be installed to make the process automatic. Something along the lines of grunt would be perfect. Node is fairly large and the goal of this was to make a small development box. Feel free to modify it to your needs!

Program Specs

This project was tested with:

Vagrant 1.8.5 VirtualBox 5.1.2 r108956 ansible 2.1.1.0