ASP.NET Core 1.0 Vagrantfile

Getting Started

This is a drop-in Vagrantfile for multi-platform testing of an ASP.NET Core 1.0 app. To get started, copy Vagrantfile into the root directory of the app and run the following script:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager
vagrant up

Then go to http://windows.web.dev and http://linux.web.dev and check out your app.

Overview

The stacks provided are shown below:

Virtual Machine	Stack
web	Windows Server 2012 R2 running IIS with HttpPlatformHandler.
web_docker	boot2docker running an NGINX reverse proxy container and Docker containers for the app.

Each virtual machine runs both the full CLR version (via Mono on Linux) and the CoreCLR version of your app, hosted as different virtual hosts. The full CLR version is the default when you go to http://windows.web.dev or http://linux.web.dev, however the CoreCLR versions are available by going to http://coreclr.windows.web.dev or http://coreclr.linux.web.dev.

The build script on Linux will NOT use the Dockerfile from the same directory of the Vagrantfile: this is because it is necessary to change the base container to use the CoreCLR version for the CoreCLR container. To make changes to the Dockerfiles used to build these versions, create files called Dockerfile.Mono or Dockerfile.CoreCLR in the project directory.

Lastly, if you have dependencies based on the ASP.NET MyGet feed, add a custom NuGet.Config file to the project directory, since your global feed will not be picked up in the virtual machines.

When you make a change to your app and you want to test the change, you can run vagrant reload to update the virtual machines. For a faster experience on the Windows virtual machine, you can also run vagrant provision --provision-with build-app to build the app without restarting.

FAQs / Known Issues

1. The Windows machine times out downloading. It's 3.5 GB. The download may time-out a few times. If you want to download the box before running vagrant up, you can use the command vagrant box add opentable/win-2012r2-standard-amd64-nocm.

2. I can't connect to any of the URLs. Make sure that your /etc/hosts file is being updated by Vagrant, and that you ran vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager.

3. I keep getting 502 Bad Gateway on the Docker VM. Wait a few minutes and try again. ASP.NET apps take some time to start up.

4. I'm running vagrant provision --provision-with build-app but my changes are not showing up in the Docker VM. Currently the only way to update the Docker VM is with vagrant reload, since rsync only runs when the VM is started. Run touch project.json before vagrant reload to force Docker to reinstall the NuGet package dependencies.

5. The Windows VM is taking a long time to boot. Often, if the VM has been around for a little while, it will decide to update itself, which takes a long time. To determine if this is happening, start the VirtualBox GUI and double click on the VM to bring up what's happening on it.

6. Can I use another VM provider? Only VirtualBox is supported right now. If you add AWS credentials, the Linux VM works well with the Ubuntu 14.04 AMI, however the Windows VM does not because there is no (simple) way to copy files to an AWS VM running Windows programatically, and Vagrant won't automatically install rsync.

7. My app needs the beta of RC2. The full runtime string is needed for dnu publish and tools like that; the beta versions often change the runtime string. There isn't an official RC2 Docker image yet either. When RC2 is officially released, this Vagrantfile will be updated.

8. My app needs a SQL Server database. SQL Server is notoriously annoying to install in Vagrant and takes up about 10 GB of hard drive space. In the interest of time to boot, this Vagrantfile does not start a SQL Server virtual machine, however there are a few Vagrant boxes which purport to provide it that can easily be added with (using sitestacker/win12-sql14 as an example): config.vm.define 'mssql' do |mssql| mssql.vm.box = 'sitestacker/win12-sql14'; end.