dotnet

Metaparticle/Package for .NET Core

Metaparticle/Package is a collection of libraries intended to make building and deploying containers a seamless and idiomatic experience for developers.

This is the implementation for .NET Core (C#).

Introduction

Metaparticle/Package simplifies and centralizes the task of building and deploying a container image.

Here is a quick example.

Consider this simple .NET Core application:

namespace simple {
    public class Program {
        public static void main(string[] args) {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello world!");
        }
    }
}

To containerize this application, you need to add the [Metaparticle.Package.Config ...] annotation and the Containerize wrapper function like this:

using static Metaparticle.Package.Driver;

namespace simple {
	public class Program {
        [Metaparticle.Package.Config(Repository = "brendanburns/dotnet-simple")]
        public static void Main(string[] args) => Containerize (args, () =>
        {
			Console.WriteLine("Hello world!");
        });
    }
}

You can then compile this application just as you have before. But now, when you run the application, instead of printing "Hello world", it first packages itself as a container, and then (optionally) deploys itself inside that container.

Environment variables

You can set some of the config attributes through environment variables so that it can be controlled from outside of the source code. This could be useful for CICD scenarios.

E.g.

set METAPARTICLE_CONFIG_REPOSITORY=docker.io/myrepo/myimagename:sometag

This will set the Repository property that you would otherwise set in the attributes. See Config.cs for supported environment variable overrides.

Tests

If you wish to add some test project to your metaparticle that get run as part of the build pipeline, you can add the tests projects (relative paths) to the Tests.Config attribute above Main, where you declare the runtime config.

[Metaparticle.Tests.Config(Names = new[] {"../my-test-folder1/", "../my-test-folder2/tests"})]

Sample project simple-web uses the test project simple-test. You can run the example to see it in action.

cd examples/simple
dotnet run

Tutorial

For a more complete exploration of the Metaparticle/Package for .NET Core, please see the in-depth tutorial.