ASP.NET 5 / MVC 6 Console Hosted App

Question

In MVC5, I had a console application that would use Microsoft.Owin.Hosting.WebApp.Start(...) to host a bunch of controllers that would be dynamically loaded from assemblies

Answer 1

Katana's WebApp static class has been replaced by WebHostBuilder, that offers a much more flexible approach: https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/blob/dev/src/Microsoft.AspNet.Hosting/WebHostBuilder.cs.

You've probably already used this API without realizing it, as it's the component used by the hosting block when you register a new web command in your project.json (e.g Microsoft.AspNet.Hosting server=Microsoft.AspNet.Server.WebListener server.urls=http://localhost:54540) and run it using dnx (e.g dnx . web):

namespace Microsoft.AspNet.Hosting
{
    public class Program
    {
        private const string HostingIniFile = "Microsoft.AspNet.Hosting.ini";
        private const string ConfigFileKey = "config";

        private readonly IServiceProvider _serviceProvider;

        public Program(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            _serviceProvider = serviceProvider;
        }

        public void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Allow the location of the ini file to be specified via a --config command line arg
            var tempBuilder = new ConfigurationBuilder().AddCommandLine(args);
            var tempConfig = tempBuilder.Build();
            var configFilePath = tempConfig[ConfigFileKey] ?? HostingIniFile;

            var appBasePath = _serviceProvider.GetRequiredService().ApplicationBasePath;
            var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder(appBasePath);
            builder.AddIniFile(configFilePath, optional: true);
            builder.AddEnvironmentVariables();
            builder.AddCommandLine(args);
            var config = builder.Build();

            var host = new WebHostBuilder(_serviceProvider, config).Build();
            using (host.Start())
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Started");
                var appShutdownService = host.ApplicationServices.GetRequiredService();
                Console.CancelKeyPress += (sender, eventArgs) =>
                {
                    appShutdownService.RequestShutdown();
                    // Don't terminate the process immediately, wait for the Main thread to exit gracefully.
                    eventArgs.Cancel = true;
                };
                appShutdownService.ShutdownRequested.WaitHandle.WaitOne();
            }
        }
    }
}

https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/blob/dev/src/Microsoft.AspNet.Hosting/Program.cs