Welcome to the port of JabbR to ASP.NET Core

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This is an open source, cross platform version of David Fowler's JabbR running on .NET Core.

Setting up for local development

For security, connection strings and other sensitive information must be stored in environment variables.

• You can easily read and write these key-value pairs using the dotnet user-secrets command
  • You must first add a reference to Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.UserSecrets in your project.json
• This command must be executed from the top level of your project (read: not solution). This is because it will try to find a project.json file referencing the executable.
  • You can easily test if the executable is found by typing

  $ dotnet user-secrets -h
  

If you correctly followed the above steps, you'll be met with a help dialog when you execute dotnet user-secrets -h that looks like this.

If you receive an error like the following

$ dotnet user-secrets -h
No executable found matching command "dotnet-user-secrets"

Then you likely need to rebuild your solution, or move into the correct project directory where the project.json file can be found.

To set a user secret, you need to use dotnet user-secrets set <key> <value>, like so

$ dotnet user-secrets set "connectionString" "Server=MYAPPNAME.database.windows.net,1433;Initial Catalog=MYCATALOG;Persist Security Info=False;User ID={plaintext user};Password={plaintext password};MultipleActiveResultSets=False;Encrypt=True;TrustServerCertificate=False;Connection Timeout=30;"

Alternatively, if you want to use LocalDB, an alternative built in database, you can run the same command as above, but with a simpler connection string like so

$ dotnet user-secrets set "connectionString" "Server=(localdb)\\mssqllocaldb;Database=aspnet-application;Trusted_Connection=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=true"

How to access your stored user secrets

In your Startup.cs file, you can access the Configuration API easily by creating an IConfigurationRoot object instance. This is created for you in the Visual Studio template project for a .NET Core Web Application, as below. Whatever key you defined for your key-value pair when you used dotnet user-secrets set <key> <value> is what you will use to access that value in your code.

private IConfigurationRoot _configuration;

public Startup(IHostingEnvironment env)
{
    // This code is templated for you upon creation of a new project in Visual Studio
    // File > New Project > .NET Core > .NET Core Web Application > Pick any of Empty, Web API, or Web Application
    var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
        .SetBasePath(env.ContentRootPath)
        .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json", optional: true, reloadOnChange: true)
        .AddJsonFile($"appsettings.{env.EnvironmentName}.json", optional: true);

    if (env.IsDevelopment())
    {
        builder.AddUserSecrets();
    }

    builder.AddEnvironmentVariables();

    _configuration = builder.Build();
}

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    // Here you are accessing the environment variable you stored under the key "connectionString"
    string connection = _configuration["connectionString"];

    // And then you can use that value to register other services, like your database.
    services.AddDbContext<JabbrContext>(options => options.UseSqlServer(connection));

The above command will set the key connectionString to an environment variable containing the given database connection string. We've used the structure of a connection string hosted on Azure, but you will have to use your own

NOTE

• You need to replace the above connection string with your own.
• You will have to replace {plaintext user} and {plaintext password} in the above connection string with your real credentials.

"Help, I can't find my connection string!" No problem, read more about Azure DB's and connections here

Learn more about safe storage of user secrets in .NET