Blog post about shared appsettings

[tincann]

Hi Andrew,

In this blogpost you're talking about sharing appsettings accross multiple projects.

.ConfigureAppConfiguration((hostingContext, config) =>
{
    var env = hostingContext.HostingEnvironment;

    var sharedFolder = Path.Combine(env.ContentRootPath, "..", "Shared");

    config
        .AddJsonFile(Path.Combine(sharedFolder, "SharedSettings.json"), optional: true) // When running using dotnet run
        .AddJsonFile("SharedSettings.json", optional: true) // When app is published
        .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: true)
        .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true);

    config.AddEnvironmentVariables();
})

The behavior I observe when setting the Build action and Copy to Output directory properties of my SharedSettings.json file to Content and Copy if newer, respectively, is that dotnet run copies the SharedSettings.json to the build directory as expected. Therefore, it is not needed to specify a path (as seen below) to the relative location of SharedSettings.json.

.AddJsonFile(Path.Combine(sharedFolder, "SharedSettings.json"), optional: true) // When running using dotnet run

This will work for local development, as well post publish. Is this correct? Or am I missing something?

Thanks!

[tincann]

I understand now. The above is true for Console apps, but not for Web apps where the ContentRoot is not equal to the build directory. I fixed it with this:

        private static IConfigurationBuilder AddSharedConfig(this IConfigurationBuilder config, IHostingEnvironment env) {
            var appSettingsPath = "appsettings-shared.json";

            if(env.EnvironmentName == "Development") {
                appSettingsPath = Path.Combine(env.ContentRootPath, "..", "appsettings-shared.json");
            }

            return config.AddJsonFile(appSettingsPath, optional: false, reloadOnChange: true);
        }

The advantage here is that you can set optional to false, which will give an error if the file can't be loaded.

[andrewlock]

Yeah, you got it 🙂 if that works for you, great! I wasn't able to use it that approach, as people run environments locally in multiple ways, so can't make those assumptions based on environment🙂