Announcing .NET Aspire Integration for ABP Microservice Template

We are excited to announce the integration of .NET Aspire into the ABP microservice solution, available starting with ABP Studio v2.0.0. This integration brings a unified development experience for building, running, debugging, and deploying distributed applications. With Aspire, you can now orchestrate your entire microservice ecosystem with a single command, eliminating complex configurations and making local development effortless.

What is .NET Aspire?

Aspire is a cloud-ready stack designed to streamline the development of distributed applications. It provides:

• Orchestration: A code-first approach to defining and running distributed applications, managing dependencies, and launch order.
• Integrations: Pre-built components for common services (databases, caches, message brokers) with automatic configuration.
• Tooling: A developer dashboard for real-time monitoring of logs, traces, metrics, and resource health.
• Service Discovery: Automatic service-to-service communication without hardcoded endpoints.
• Observability: Built-in OpenTelemetry support for distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging.

How Does It Work with ABP?

When you enable .NET Aspire in an ABP microservice solution, you get a fully integrated development experience where:

• All microservices, gateways, and applications are orchestrated through a single entry point (AppHost).
• Infrastructure containers (databases, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, etc.) are managed as code.
• OpenTelemetry, health checks, and service discovery are automatically configured for all projects via the shared ServiceDefaults project.

Enabling Aspire in Your Solution

When creating a new microservice solution via ABP Studio:

1. In the solution creation wizard, look for the ".NET Aspire Integration" step.
2. Toggle the option to enable .NET Aspire.
3. Complete the wizard—Aspire projects will be generated along with your solution.

Solution Structure Changes

When Aspire is enabled, two additional projects are added to your solution:

AppHost (Orchestrator)

AppHost is the .NET Aspire orchestrator project that declares all resources (services, databases, containers, applications) and their dependencies in C# code. It provides:

• Centralized orchestration: Start your entire microservice ecosystem with a single command.
• Code-first infrastructure: Databases, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, and observability tools are defined programmatically.
• Dependency management: Services start in the correct order using WaitFor() declarations.
• Automatic configuration: Connection strings, endpoints, and environment variables are injected automatically.

ServiceDefaults

ServiceDefaults is a shared library that provides common cloud-native configuration for all projects in the solution. Every service uses the same observability, health check, and resilience patterns.

Feature	Description
OpenTelemetry	Tracing, metrics, and structured logging with automatic instrumentation
Health Checks	/health and /alive endpoints for Kubernetes-style probes
Service Discovery	Automatic resolution of service endpoints
HTTP Resilience	Retry policies, timeouts, and circuit breakers for HTTP clients

Running the Solution with Aspire

Running your microservice solution has never been easier:

1. Open Solution Runner in ABP Studio.
2. Select the Aspire profile.
3. Run AppHost.

AppHost automatically:

• Starts all infrastructure containers (database, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, etc.).
• Launches all microservices, gateways, and applications in dependency order.
• Injects connection strings and environment variables.
• Opens the Aspire Dashboard for monitoring.

Aspire Dashboard

The Aspire Dashboard provides real-time tracking of your application's state. It enables you to monitor logs, traces, metrics, and environment configurations in an intuitive UI.

Key Dashboard Features

Console Logs

Display console logs from all resources in real-time. Filter by resource and log level to quickly find relevant information during development and debugging.

Structured Logs

View structured logs from all resources with advanced filtering capabilities. Search and filter logs by resource, log level, timestamp, and custom properties.

Distributed Traces

Explore distributed traces across your microservices to understand request flows and identify performance bottlenecks.

Metrics

Monitor real-time metrics including HTTP requests, response times, garbage collection, memory usage, and custom metrics.

Pre-Configured Observability Tools

AppHost comes with pre-configured observability and management tools:

Grafana

Visualization and analytics platform for monitoring metrics with interactive dashboards.

Jaeger

Distributed tracing system to monitor and troubleshoot problems across microservices.

Kibana

Visualization tool for Elasticsearch data with search and data visualization capabilities for logs.

Prometheus

Monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores metrics as time series data.

RabbitMQ Management

Web-based interface for managing and monitoring the RabbitMQ message broker.

Redis Insight

Visual tool for Redis that allows you to browse data, run commands, and monitor performance.

Database Admin Tools

The database management admin tool varies by database type:

Database	Tool
SQL Server	DBeaver CloudBeaver
MySQL	phpMyAdmin
PostgreSQL	pgAdmin
MongoDB	Mongo Express

Get Started Today

Ready to experience the power of .NET Aspire with ABP? Create a new microservice solution in ABP Studio and enable the .NET Aspire integration option. For detailed documentation, visit our .NET Aspire Integration documentation.

To learn more about .NET Aspire, visit: https://aspire.dev

We are excited to bring this integration to you and can't wait to hear your feedback. If you have any questions or suggestions, please drop a comment below.

Happy coding!

The Volosoft Team