Publish to a Linux Production Environment

In this guide, we will cover setting up a production-ready ASP.NET environment on an Ubuntu 14.04 Server. Though we will cover the specifics of using Ubuntu 14.04, the content will be applicable to other flavors of Linux.

We will take an existing ASP.NET 5 application and place it behind a reverse-proxy server. We will then setup the reverse-proxy server to forward requests to our Kestrel web server.

Additionally we will write a startup script to ensure our web application runs on startup as a daemon as well as a configure a process management tool to help restart our web application in the event of a crash to guarantee high availibility.

Prerequisites

Acess to an Ubuntu 14.04 Server with a standard user account with sudo privilege.
Public access to port 80 on your server. You may want to use IPTables to restrict access to your server.
An exisiting ASP.NET 5 application. If you do not have an application you can use Visual Studio or the Yeoman generator to quickly scaffold an app.

##Install Mono

# Add the Mono Project package repository to your system
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
sudo apt-get update

# Verify that the version of Mono you are going to install is greater 4.0
command `apt-cache policy mono-complete | grep Candidate

# Install Mono
sudo apt-get install mono-complete

##Install LibUV

# Dependecies to build LibUV from source
sudo apt-get install automake libtool curl

curl -sSL https://github.com/libuv/libuv/archive/v1.4.2.tar.gz | sudo tar zxfv - -C /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src/libuv-1.4.2
sudo sh autogen.sh
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/src/libuv-1.4.2 && cd ~/
sudo ldconfig

##Install DNVM(Dot Net Version Manager)

sudo apt-get install unzip
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aspnet/Home/dev/dnvminstall.sh | DNX_BRANCH=dev sh && source ~/.dnx/dnvm/dnvm.sh

##Copy over your app Run dnu publish from your dev environment to package your application into a self-contained directory that can be launched.

Before we proceed, go ahead and copy over your ASP.NET 5 application to your server using whatever tool (SCP, FTP, etc) integrates into your workflow. Try and run the app and navigate to http://yourserveraddress: in your browser to see if the application runs fine on Linux. I recommend you have a working app before proceeding.

If you do not have an application, I recommend using the Yeoman generators to quickly scaffold a skeleton app.

Configure a reverse proxy server

A reverse proxy is a common setup for serving dynamic web applications. The reverse proxy terminates the HTTP request and forwards it to the ASP.NET application.

###Why use a reverse-proxy server? Kestrel is great for serving dynamic content from ASP.NET, however the web serving parts aren’t as feature rich full-featured servers like IIS, Apache or Nginx. A reverse proxy-server can allow you to offload work like serving static content, caching requests, compressing requests, and SSL termination from the application server. The reverse proxy server may reside on a dedicated machine or may be deployed alongside an application server.

For the purposes of this guide, we are going to use a single instance of Nginx, however based on your requirements you may chose a different setup.

###Install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

If you plan to install optional Nginx modules you may be required to build Nginx from source.

We are going to apt-get to install Nginx. The installer also creates a System V init script that runs Nginx as daemon on system startup. Since we just installed Nginx for the first time, we can explicitly start it by running

sudo service nginx start

At this point you should be able to navigate to your browser and see the default landing page for Nginx.

###Configure Nginx We will now configure Nginx as a reverse proxy to forward requests to our ASP.NET application

We will be modifying the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, so open it up in your favorite text editor and replace the contents with the following.

server {
    listen 80;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
}

This is one of the simplest configuration files for Nginx that forwards incoming pulbic traffic on your port 80 to port number 5000 internally

I have used port 5000 in this example, but be sure to change this to the port your ASP.NET application will listen on.

You might want to look at etc/nginx/nginx.conf to make other necessary changes to your nginx environment to configure your nginx environment. I have included my nginx.conf file for reference

user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
pid /run/nginx.pid;

events {
        worker_connections 768;
        # multi_accept on;
}

http {

        ##
        # Basic Settings
        ##

        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay off;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;
        # server_tokens off;

        # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
        # server_name_in_redirect off;

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;

        ##
        # Logging Settings
        ##

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

        ##
        # Gzip Settings
        ##

        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        gzip_vary on;
        gzip_proxied any;
        gzip_comp_level 6;
        gzip_buffers 16 8k;
        gzip_http_version 1.0;
        gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Once you have completed making changes to your nginx configuration you can run sudo nginx -t to verify the syntax of your configuration files. If you see any no errors you can ask nginx to pick up the changes by running sudo nginx -s reload

##Create an user to run your application For security reasons it is commonplace to run your application as an unprivileged user on Linux. Let us go ahead and create a unpriviliged user to run our ASP.NET web application

sudo su
adduser --system --no-create-home --group aspnet
exit

##Install a DNX globally

This workaround is only required till this change gets merged

# Grab a DNX from NuGet
dnvm upgrade

# Make it available globally
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/dnx/runtimes/
sudo cp -R ~/.dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6/ /usr/local/lib/dnx/runtimes/
sudo chmod 775 -R /usr/local/lib/dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6/
sudo chown -R aspnet /usr/local/lib/dnx/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6/

##Start our web application on startup We will create an Upstart script to launch our application on startup. This will vary based on whether you are using System V Init, Upstart or Systemd as your startup system.

Create a new startup script by running sudo touch /etc/init/aspnet5webserver.conf. Using your preferred text editor update the file contents to match what is shown below.

# Copyright (c) .NET Foundation
# Licensed under the MIT License
author "Sourabh Shirhatti"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [016]

script
    exec start-stop-daemon --start --make-pidfile --pidfile /var/run/aspnet5webserver.pid --chuid aspnet --exec /usr/local/lib/runtimes/dnx-mono.1.0.0-beta6/bin/dnx /path/to/packaged/app kestrel
end script

pre-start script
    echo "[`date`] (sys) Starting" >> /var/log/aspnet5webserver.sys.log
end script

post-stop script
    rm /var/run/aspnet5webserver.pid
    echo "[`date`] (sys) Stopped" >> /var/log/aspnet5webserver.sys.log
end script

###Viewing your logs Upstart will redirect your stdout and stderr to /var/log/upstart/aspnet5webserver.log and can be easily viewed from there.

##Monitoring our process Now we have our application set to start on system reboots, however we still need to monitor our application for unresponsiveness and crashes. In this guide I will be using Monit to periodically check if the our web server is still running and restart it in the event of a crash.

Installing Monit

sudo apt-get install monit

Configuring Monit

You can add the following files to your /etc/monit/conf.d/ directory. You may also want to change additional settings like how frequently Monit runs in /etc/monit/monitrc.

####nginx.conf

check process nginx with pidfile /var/run/nginx.pid
    start program = "/etc/init.d/nginx start"
    stop program = "/etc/init.d/nginx stop"

####aspnet5webserver.conf

check process aspnet5webserver with pidfile /var/run/aspnet5webserver.pid
    start program = "/sbin/start aspnet5webserver"
    stop program = "/sbin/stop aspnet5webserver"
	if failed port 5000 protocol HTTP
        request /
        with timeout 10 seconds
        then restart

Once you have edited these files, you can run sudo monit -t to verify that your control file syntax is correct. If there are no errors you can service monit reload to update monit with your new configuration.

shirhatti/guide.md

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