ANCM should be available as a standalone installer

[Tratcher]

From @Petermarcu on October 9, 2017 1:9

@jberezanski asked for this.

Filing this to track the only open issue here: dotnet/core#848

Copied from original issue: dotnet/aspnetcore#2236

[jkotalik]

@shirhatti @pan-wang I think we can pull this off with adding ANCM to Universe. Would we package it as aspnetcore.dll and the schema file?

[guardrex]

Note that the ask for this just came up again on Slack from @tebeco. Several have asked over the last year or so. I think the set of switches for the hosting bundle installer that permitted only the module and schema to be installed were disabled around the time that the runtime store bits were added.

I hope this will feature will come back ... it's really nice for self-contained app lovers ❤️.

[EDIT] imo, the old approach of a switch for the hosting bundle installer would be ok, too.

[tebeco]

a small summary of the question i asked on slack looked like this :
how do you go to production with a hight velocity and really small friction ?
Easy if there near to 0 manual or semi manual operation on server.
By that i mean,

• no runtime installed globally
• no patch campaign
• no installer as much as possible

Choice obviously goes for self contained app.
But then a problem appear when you are trying to host behind/within IIS
best choice with 2.1.x seems ANCM configured to w3wp bootstrap the app

So the big question is easy, how do i get ANCM + thé website, up and running on an iis server where all i have to do is :

• drop appoffline.html
• swap content
• remove appoffline.html

the new “content” contains self contained ed app so it can update the runtime to 2.2.x for example

but how will we get to update the ANCM ?

windows update on corporate network is a joke, for tons of bad excuses ... still not a possibility

msi could be a choice but probably the last one ;)

[tebeco]

And here is the harder question

let’s pretend there is a stand-alone installer

let’s predict a new version of ANCM with breaking changes
we kinda share IIS in DMZ so ...
in order to install patched ANCM, we are driven by the slowest app aligning to this new version of ANCM ? (because of that potential breaking change in the patch)

so unless ANCM is fully self contained within the dropped artifact how should we deal with this scenario ?

[tebeco]

also about that previous question ... if we ship to any cloud are we driven by the fact that ANCM need to be shipped on IIS on that cloud (meening not the app owner but the company responsible for the cloud MSFT, amazon etc ....)

having a fully self contained app that include the Module would help not rely on all this kind of friction

[shirhatti]

I think we can pull this off with adding ANCM to Universe. Would we package it as aspnetcore.dll and the schema file?

@jkotalik Maybe bring back https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNetCore.AspNetCoreModule ?

[shirhatti]

@tebeco Completely hear you. I'm going to paste in a blurb from a blog post I wrote on this.

It has been hard to iterate on ANCM since we’ve had to ensure forward and backward compatibility between every version of ASP.NET Core and ANCM that has shipped thus far. To mitigate this problem going forward, we’ve refactored our code into two separate components: the ASP.NET Core Shim (shim), and the ASP.NET Core Request Handler (request handler). The shim (aspnetcore.dll), as the name suggests, is a lightweight shim, where as the request handler (aspnetcorerh.dll) does all the request processing.Going forward, the shim will ship globally and will continue to be installed via the Windows Server Hosting installer. The request handler will now ship via a NuGet package- Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.IIS, which you can directly reference in your application or consume via the ASP.NET Core metapackage or shared runtime. As a consequence, two different ASP.NET Core applications running on the same server can use a different version of the request handler.

[jkotalik]

Possibly. I'd rather not give a nuget package where people need to drop nuget packages globally...

[tebeco]

@shirhatti thx for the clarification

@jkotalik

people need to drop nuget packages globally

what does this mean ?
what do you propose ?

[DerAlbertCom]

ANCM as a Standalone Installer would be really nice for ASP.NET Core Deployment on Fullframework without the need to install the .NET Core Runtime.

[sdecker]

This is a MUST to be able to service .Net Core properly with embedding the runtime.

[guardrex]

@sdecker See if the switches on the hosting bundle installer meet your needs 👉 https://docs.microsoft.com/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/iis#install-the-hosting-bundle

[sdecker]

Interesting. Is that a recent documentation update? We had not found that on our previous research. One concern is that the bundle still increments with each .Net Core release even though the IIS hosting code rarely changes.