Target Audience

I've aimed this article at people who want to learn about deployment of dotnet applications on low budget

Learning Objectives

After completing this article, you will know how to do the following:

Register dotnet application as systemd service in linux
Use a simple reverse proxy

How can we deploy our dotnet applications on a low budget ?

It's easy to use a cloud provider with built-in solutions for application deployment, but for hobby projects or non-profit projects, the costs can quickly add up. By managing your own deployments, you have the opportunity to keep your tech stack streamlined and efficient, avoiding unnecessary complexity. This approach not only saves money but also gives you full control over your environment, allowing for more customized and optimized solutions tailored to your project's specific needs.

My approach (step by step)

Let's assume that you will be hosting a dotnet application as a hobby project. Here is how i would do it.

Steps:

1 - Buy a 4$ VPS (linux)

2 - Create a systemd service for dotnet

3 - Create a reverse proxy

4 - Buy a domain

5 - Setup cloudflare

And that's it really.

Now i will give examples for steps 2 and 3. For other steps it is self explanotory so you can do it yourself too.

Creating a systemd service for our dotnet

To register our service to linux service we need to create a systemd service file.

Take the following steps to create systemd service file:

1 - type following command to linux terminal

vi /etc/systemd/system/customer.service

2 - put the following content in it

[Unit]
Description=Customer API

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/opt/app/customer

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/dotnet /opt/app/customer/Customer.API.dll --urls "https://0.0.0.0:5251"


KillSignal=SIGINT
SyslogIdentifier=customer
User=root
Environment=ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

3 - sudo systemctl daemon-reload

You have to do this whenever any of the service files change at all so that system picks up the new info.

4 - sudo systemctl start customer

5 - sudo systemctl status customer

this command shows the status of a service.

Reverse proxy

For this blog i will use Caddy server but you can use anything you are familiar with.

To download caddy on your machine you can check out here

Configuration

Create a Caddyfile to configure Caddy to serve your .NET application.

Create a Caddyfile:
```
sudo nano /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
```

Add the following configuration to your Caddyfile:

yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:5251
}

Replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name and localhost:5251 with the port where your .NET application is running.

3.Start caddy server

sudo systemctl enable caddy
sudo systemctl start caddy