Per-Branch Persistence Strategy for Aspire Development Environments

[Jeffreyyvdb]

Hi

Following the conversation in CommunityToolkit Issue #726 and the feedback from @aaronpowell, I wanted to open a broader discussion on handling persistent services (databases, queues, caches, etc.) across branches in Aspire-based development.

Problem

This problem is especially noticeable with databases (e.g., PostgreSQL with EF Core), but applies just as well to Redis, RabbitMQ, Azure Storage etc etc.

Proposal

I prototyped an extension that uses the current git branch name to suffxi the database name, automatically creating a per-branch instance for PostgreSQL:

builder.AddPostgres("postgres")
    .WithDataVolume()
    .AddDatabaseWithBranchNameSuffix("database");

This allows seamless branch switching during development and preserves isolation without requiring manual cleanup.

👉 Repo: https://github.com/Jeffreyyvdb/AspireDevDatabasePerBranch

Broader Question

How can Aspire better support per-branch persistence strategies in the development workflow?

I'm wondering if this kind of utility should:

• Be generalized across multiple service types (Postgres, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.)
• Be opt-in via an Aspire extension or a CommunityToolkit package

Be configurable per service or globally in the application builder

Would love to hear how others are managing this today and whether there's interest in evolving a pattern or built-in feature that enables per-branch isolation more easily.

Thanks!

[danegsta]

There's also a configuration option you can use to append a custom suffix to all local orchestration resources.

builder.Configuration["DcpPublisher:ResourceNameSuffix"] = "somevalue"; would result in your postgres resource being named postgres-<identifier>-somevalue (where <identifier> is the ID Aspire appends to a given resource name to either randomize it for non-persistent resources or make it predictable for persistent resources). You could define an extension method on the builder to set that and have it automatically apply to all resources during local development.

[danegsta]

Something like this based off your existing extension method:

public static IDistributedApplicationBuilder WithResourceBranchNameSuffix(this IDistributedApplicationBuilder builder)
{
    var branchName = GetCurrentGitBranch();
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(branchName))
    {
        return builder;
    }

    builder.Configuration["DcpPublisher:ResourceNameSuffix"] = SanitizeBranchName(branchName);
    return builder;
}