Hosting Nancy with FastCgi

In case you want to host your Nancy application while using a web server of your choice, be it IIS, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd or any other FastCgi enabled web server, there is the option of using Fos.

Fos is a library that allows an Owin console application to receive requests through a FastCgi socket from a web server. Fos is also designed to run well with Mono on all platforms.

Setting up your application with nginx on Linux

We will show you how to set up FastCgi on nginx and how to run your Owin application with Fos. The idea applies to any web server, so feel free to try others.

First, let us configure nginx by editing /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (or wherever your distribution put that file), and modifying your main location block like shown below:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;
    ...
    
    location / {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    }
}

That's it for nginx! Now let's create a Nancy application to run it with Fos. Start a new console project and install Nancy, Nancy.Owin and Fos - you can find them all on NuGet. You will also need Mono to run your application. After that, change your application's Main method's code and your main class to something in the lines of:

using Fos;
using Fos.Owin;
using Nancy;
using Nancy.Owin;

namespace MyApplication.Startup {
    public static class OwinAppSetup
    {
        private static void ConfigureOwin(IAppBuilder builder) {
            builder.UseNancy();
        }

        public static void Main(string[] args) {
            using (var fosServer = new FosSelfHost(ConfigureOwin))
            {
                fosServer.Bind(System.Net.IPAddress.Loopback, 9000);
                fosServer.Start(false);
            }
        }
    }
}

And that is it! Don't forget to either restart nginx or reload the configuration file. Then just build and run your application and you're good to go! You can also start Fos with a Unix Socket, not to mention it comes with some Owin middleware to help you out with logging access times and some other stuff. Check the official website for more.

More info

You can (and should, if you want to use Fos) read more about Fos at the official website. Fos is still in its infancy so you should probably not use it for production. Also, if anyone knows how to set up IIS with FastCgi through a TCP Socket, the author of Fos would very much like to know how to put that information up.