In this blog post, we will cover some helpful to tips kick start your new back-end API project with ServiceStack.
In this blog post, we will cover some helpful to tips kick start your new back-end API project with ServiceStack.
In this blog post, we will cover some helpful to tips kick start your new back-end API project with ServiceStack.
ServiceStack is simple and fastest .Net web service framework. Because of many awesome features provided by {ServiceStack}, it has been very popular if you want to build back-end API in .Net. We recently started one of our cool project where ServiceStack is used for back-end. In this blog post, we will cover some helpful tips to kick start your new back-end API project with ServiceStack.
ServiceStackVS is a visual studio (supports 2012,2013,2015) extension that will save your time when you setup your project from scratch. It has many starter templates like:
We actually wanted to use Visual Studio 2017 Community edition and since this extension do not support it, we created a base project using Visual Studio 2015 and surprisingly, it worked without any problem in Visual Studio 2017 as well. We used ServiceStack ASP.NET MVC4 & MVC5 template and it created following projects in a single solution
After hitting F5 and locate to /api will show ServiceStack metadata page that has hello service listed! Great way to quickly get started! Have you tried any other templates? How is your experience with it?
Swagger API supports developer documentation, integrated test, request and response DTO and advance user experience while browsing API documentation.
Installation of the swagger package is quite straight forward as per the documentation.
Installation of the swagger package is quite straight forward as per the documentation.
After installation of this package, I wanted to customize Swagger API's embedded resources to provide project specific branding from here. We used DownGit to copy the specific resource directory from github. Pasted entire folder into root of mvc project and adjusted index.html to point to ../api/resources path to automatically document services on launch.
It is quick and easy to follow ServiceStack Logging documentation to install nuget package and adjust the AppHost.cs
After this configuration, I wanted to have NLog.config which took a little while to figure out. Here is the example NLog.config that I ended up with:
Once this setup is done, you can use contructor inject or resolve ILog anywhere in your ServiceStack project.
Authentication & Authorization in ServiceStack is configurable. We inherited CredentialsAuthProvider provider to implement our own version of authentication provider. Our next 3 tips are around those configurations. Here is how our authentication configuration looks like:
/api/auth, /api/authenticate, /api/auth/{Porivder}, /api/register, /api/assignrole, /api/unassignrole and /api/authenticate/{providers} are the default routes automatically added when you enable credentials authentication.
In our code, line 5-7 shows how we are replacing the login and logout service to custom routes /api/Account/Login and /api/Account/{Provider}" respectively.
Line 5-7 in above code shows how to exclude role and registration service support from credentials authentication provider.
You can configure other important settings like GenerateNewSessionCookiesOnAuthentication, DeleteSessionCookiesOnLogout, MaxLoginAttempts, ValidateUniqueEmails, ValidateUniqueUserNames etc.
With credentials authentication provider, only authenticated clients supporting cookies can consume your secure services.
In order to support cookieless/stateless authenticated services, we are implementing ServiceStack JWT Authentication and returning Bearer Token and Refresh Token in credential authentication response.
Here is the code that shows how we tweak credentials authentication provider to return bearer and refresh token upon successful login.
Register JwtAuthProvider right after credentials authentication provider.
In your custom user session class, add bearer token and refresh token properties.
And finally, use JWTAuthProvider object to set bearer and refresh token.
Set Authorization Bearer {token} header to call any secure service.
When you want to follow agile and do sprint wise development, its critical to have database versioning. Fluent Migrator is good option to use. We just came across this awesome implementation of Fluent Migrator for ServiceStack project in github which seems to be cool.
Unfortunately, I was not able to some dependency issues, I was not able to directly use it by adding it as nuget package but I was able to easily copy paste the service and it worked like a charm!
We already forked the project to see how we can help out to fix the issue to contribute back to the community.
You can use [Exclude(Feature.Metadata)] attribute on request DTO to exclude service from metadata & swagger documentation.
If you want to exclude some services defined inside ServiceStack framework, you can use typeof(className).AddAttributes(new ExcludeAttribute(Feature.Metadata)); to exclude those services.
Another candidate to be included in the starter kit itself, here is the code:
Prashant Lakhlani Lead Architect, Facile Technolab Sunday, April 30, 2017
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