Last Update: July 25, 2021

Codelab Objective

Additional codelabs cover deploying a custom domain name and SSL certificate. link

Revision History

• 2021/07/25: First release.

• .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5, or .NET 6 (preview) SDK
• Amezmo account
• GitHub Account
• GitHub CLI
• Git CLI

Today, Amezmo supports .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5, and .NET 6 applications running in Linux containers. This codelab was written using the .NET Core SDK version 3.1.411 on .NET Core runtime 3.1.17. You can also use .NET 5 or .NET 6.

Visual Studio and Visual Code

If you prefer to use Visual Studio or Visual Code to develop your application, you can. This codelab demonstrates using command line tools in a command prompt (shell). In future codelabs, I plan to demonstrate deploying applications to Amezmo using Visual Studio and Visual Code.

Note: These SDKs are included with Visual Studio. Check that you have a current version installed.

dotnet --list-sdks

3.1.411 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk]
5.0.302 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk]
6.0.100-preview.6.21355.2 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk]

.NET Core 3.1 SDK

Download and install the .NET Core 3.1 SDK.

.NET 5 SDK

Download and install the .NET 5.0 SDK.

.NET 6 SDK

Download and install the .NET 6.0 SDK.

Amezmo Account

If you do not already have an Amezmo account, go to amezmo.com to sign up.

If you have a coupon code go to credits to apply your code after creating an account.

GitHub Account

GitHub is an amazing platform that provides project repositories that integrate with source code control tools. You will need a GitHub account to deploy applications to Amezmo.

Go to github.com and create an account. If you already have an account, skip this step.

GitHub CLI

The GitHub CLI provides several features for creating and managing your GitHub repositories. Without the CLI, repositories must be created using a web browser.

Download and install the CLI.

Browse the documentation to review the commands and features.

After installing the CLI, authenticate the CLI with your GitHub account.

gh auth login

Git CLI

The Git CLI provides the command line interface to GitHub. Git is an open source distributed version control system. We will use Git to push project and code changes to GitHub which will then automatically deploy to Amezmo.

After installing the CLI, authenticate the CLI with your GitHub account.

Preparation

Once you have created the required accounts and installed the developer tools, either restart your command prompt or reboot your system. The tools modify your environment which requires restarting command prompts.

Once you create a new Amezmo account, you will be presented with an interface to deploy an application.

Do not select an application type. Instead setup your account. Located top right of the window, click the account wheel next to Support.

From the menu select Profile. Setup your profile and account security.

From the menu select Billing, and then to Payment methods. Setup your payment methods and optionally invoice settings.

You can review your estimated bill at any time, go to Billing and then to Estimated bill.

If you have a credit code, go to Billing and then to Credits. Enter the promotion code.

For each deployed application, Amezmo provides a nice interface to manage and monitor your application. Compared to the major cloud vendors, this well-designed interface is very easy to work with and requires significantly less training.

• Amezmo Documentation

In this part we will build a simple ASP.NET Core web application. Amezmo's support for .NET is very good and most applications can be ported to run as an Amezmo application with no changes.

Create a directory for your project. In this codelab, we will use c:\development\webapp .

mkdir \development\webapp
cd \development\webapp

Use dotnet command line tool to create your application:

.NET Core 3.1:

dotnet new webapp --framework netcoreapp3.1 --no-https

.NET 5:

dotnet new webapp --framework net5.0 --no-https

.NET 6:

dotnet new webapp --framework net6.0 --no-https

Notice the flag --no-https. Amezmo provides a proxy in front of your application that provides support for HTTP and HTTPS. Your application only needs to support HTTP.

IPv6 Support:

Amezmo does not support IPv6. To prevent a warning about IPv6, change applicationUrl in Properties\launchSettings.json to only listen on IPv4 localhost HTTP port 5000:

      "applicationUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:5000",

You can test the app by running it locally with the command dotnet run. You should see the application listening on port 5000:

dotnet run
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Now listening on: http://127.0.0.1:5000
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Hosting environment: Development
info: Microsoft.Hosting.Lifetime[0]
      Content root path: C:\development\webapp

While developing my application, I like to use the watch feature. Each time I change a source file, dotnet run will restart.

dotnet watch run

IPv6 Support

The IPv6 notice is written to the Amezmo logs. On the main application interface is the Logs tab.

On the Logs tab is the log file /logs/dotnet-production.log. Click the log name to see issues starting the .NET application instance.

Unable to bind to http://localhost:5000 on the IPv6 loopback interface: 'Address not available'.

In this step, we will create a GitHub repository and put our project's files under source code control.

This requires the following tools are installed on your system. Both tools run from the command line. Amezmo also supports using Visual Studio and Visual Code in addition to these command line tools.

• GitHub CLI
• Git Version Control System

git init
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/development/webapp/.git

git config --global user.email username@example.com
git config --global user.name "John Doe"

gh auth login

gh repo create mywebapp --private
? Would you like to add a .gitignore? Yes
? Choose a .gitignore template VisualStudio
? Would you like to add a license? Yes
? Choose a license MIT License
? This will add an "origin" git remote to your local repository. Continue? Yes
Created repository jhanley-com/mywebapp on GitHub
Added remote https://github.com/jhanley-com/mywebapp.git

git add --all

git commit -m "Initial Project"

git push -u origin master

An Amezmo Application Instance is a Linux container running on an EC2 instance at AWS. Amezmo provides SSH access to the container, which I will cover in a separate article. The container provides Nginx, MariaDB, Redis, .NET Core, and Git. Whereas other vendors deploy the application and container as one unit, which is recreated each time you deploy an update, Amezmo creates a long lifetime container and uses file system symbolic links to switch deployments. This feature allows zero downtime for application updates and simple rollbacks on failures.

Add application

Once you have created an account, create a new application. Click "Add application".

Choose application type

Choose ".NET".

Fill in the application details.

Amezmo currently supports four regions: Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Configure application settings

Select the .NET version. Currently .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5.0 are supported.

Make note of the MariaDB settings for later use.

Select the instance type.

For this codelab, select "Business". We will need access to several features that are not available for the "Hobby" or "Developer" instance types. Amezmo supports changing the instance type at any time with no downtime.

After you click "Launch", Amezmo will deploy a container for your .NET Core application.

Once this completes, you will be presented with a screen to select a Git provider. We will deploy a Git provider in the "Deploy to Amezmo" step next.

Summary

In this step, we will connect the GitHub repository created in step 5 with our Amezmo .NET Core application.You will need your GitHub credentials and the name of the repository to deploy.

Click on the "Git" tab. Three Git providers are displayed. Select "GitHub".

The next step is to continue to GitHub to authorize Amezmo to access your code repository. Click Continue to GitHub.

Review the permissions that GitHub is granting to Amezmo. Click Authorize amezmo.

Once Amezmo is authorized, select the GitHub repository and Branch. Normally, the .NET Public domain root should be left at /wwwroot.

Next, select the Deployment type. To enable automatic deployments after new commit are made, select Yes.

Once you click Start deployment, Amezmo will pull the repository from GitHub and deploy your code to the application instance.

Review the status of the deployment.

Summary

In this step, we deployed our application source files to our Amezmo application instance. Located on the "Domains" tab is the internal domain. Launch a web browser to view your application.

Now that your application is deployed to an Amezmo application instance, updating the application is very easy.

In your favorite editor, edit the application file Pages/index.cshtml. Replace the contents with the following:

@page
@model IndexModel
@{
    ViewData["Title"] = "Home page";
}

<div class="text-center">
    <h1 class="display-4">Welcome</h1>
    <p>.NET running on Amezmo</p>
<div>

In a command prompt, execute the following GitHub commands:

git add .
git commit -m "Updated my application".

The previous command stages the changes. Now we will push the changes to GitHub. The GitHub repository will be updated and a notification will be sent to Amezmo. Amezmo will pull the changes and redeploy your application. This process takes about one minute.

git push

In this codelab, we deployed an example .NET application. The next step is to secure that application with a custom domain and HTTPS. This step is covered in the codelab Configure Domain and SSL

More Information

• Amezmo - Managed Application Hosting
• Amezmo - Managed .NET Hosting
• Amezmo - Managed PHP Hosting
• Amezmo - Managed Laravel Hosting