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Aspire

Stable

Aspire is a framework for building observable, production-ready .NET cloud-native applications.

Property Value
Current Version 13.x
Forge Compatibility Forge 3.0
Status Stable

Description

Aspire is designed to improve the experience of building .NET cloud-native apps. It provides a consistent, opinionated set of tools and patterns that help you build and run distributed apps.

Aspire serves as the orchestration layer for Forge applications, managing local development environments, service discovery, and observability.

Why we use it

Aspire is used to orchestrate the running of multiple .NET projects, non-.NET projects, and containers locally. It also provides a dashboard for displaying running processes and viewing OpenTelemetry data.

Aspire provides an opinionated way to configure key .NET middleware:

  • HttpClient
  • CORS
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Caching
  • Service Discovery
  • Health Checks

When to use it

  • ✅ Local development orchestration for multi-project solutions
  • ✅ Managing dependencies (databases, message queues, caches) locally
  • ✅ Viewing distributed traces and logs during development
  • ✅ Service discovery between application components

When NOT to use it:

  • ❌ Production deployment orchestration (use SAIF terraform modules instead)
  • ⚠️ Single-project applications may not need the full orchestration

Prerequisites

  • .NET 10 SDK
  • Docker Desktop (for container-based resources)
  • Aspire CLI
Guide Description
API Integration Testing Testing with Aspire's DistributedApplicationTestingBuilder
WireMock CLI Hosting Hosting WireMock in Aspire
Aspire Playwright Browser-based integration testing with Aspire