Create a .NET app in the App Engine flexible environment

Create a .NET app in the App Engine flexible environment

Region ID

The REGION_ID is an abbreviated code that Google assigns based on the region you select when you create your app. The code does not correspond to a country or province, even though some region IDs may appear similar to commonly used country and province codes. For apps created after February 2020, REGION_ID.r is included in App Engine URLs. For existing apps created before this date, the region ID is optional in the URL.

Learn more about region IDs.

OK

This quickstart shows you how to create a small App Engine app that displays a short message.

Before you begin

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to check if billing is enabled on a project.

4. Enable the Cloud Build API.

   Enable the API

5. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

6. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

   gcloud init

7. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

8. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to check if billing is enabled on a project.

9. Enable the Cloud Build API.

   Enable the API

10. Install the Google Cloud CLI.

11. To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

    gcloud init

Additional prerequisites

1. Initialize your App Engine app with your project and choose its region:

   gcloud app create --project=[YOUR_PROJECT_ID]
   

   When prompted, select the region where you want to locate your App Engine application.

   Caution: You cannot change an app's region once it has been set.

2. Install the following prerequisites:

• Install the .NET Core SDK, LTS version.

• If you are using Visual Studio, you must use version 2015 or later. Images are available for ASP.NET Core apps written for .NET Core 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and 2.1.

• To deploy to App Engine directly from Visual Studio, install Tools for Visual Studio.

App Engine locations

App Engine is regional, which means the infrastructure that runs your apps is located in a specific region, and Google manages it so that it is available redundantly across all of the zones within that region.

Meeting your latency, availability, or durability requirements are primary factors for selecting the region where your apps are run. You can generally select the region nearest to your app's users, but you should consider the locations where App Engine is available as well as the locations of the other Google Cloud products and services that your app uses. Using services across multiple locations can affect your app's latency as well as its pricing.

You cannot change an app's region after you set it.

Note: Two locations, which are called europe-west and us-central in App Engine commands and in the Google Cloud console, are called europe-west1 and us-central1, respectively, elsewhere in Google documentation.

If you already created an App Engine application, you can view its region by doing one of the following:

• Run the gcloud app describe command.

• Open the App Engine Dashboard in the Google Cloud console. The region appears near the top of the page.

OK

This quickstart assumes that you are familiar with building web apps with C#.

Download the Hello World app

We've created a simple Hello World app for App Engine so you can quickly get a feel for deploying an app to the Google Cloud. The Hello World app is similar to the app created by Visual Studio when an empty ASP.NET core app is created. The sample app adds an app.yaml file. The app.yaml file is an App Engine configuration file that specifies your runtime and other App Engine settings.

1. Clone the Hello World sample app repository to your local machine.

   git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/dotnet-docs-samples
   

   Alternatively, you can download the sample as a zip file and extract it.

2. Change to the directory that contains the sample code. cd dotnet-docs-samples/appengine/flexible/HelloWorld

Run Hello World on your local machine

Visual Studio

To run the Hello World app on your local computer:

1. Open dotnet-docs-samples\appengine\flexible\HelloWorld\HelloWorld.sln with Visual Studio.
2. Press F5.

   You can see the "Hello World" message from the sample app displayed in the page.

Command Line

To run the Hello World app on your local computer:

1. Run the following commands from the dotnet-docs-samples\appengine\flexible\HelloWorld directory:

   dotnet restore
   dotnet run

2. In your web browser, go to http://localhost:5000/

   You can see the "Hello World" message from the sample app displayed in the page.

3. In your terminal window, press Ctrl+C to exit the web server.

Deploy and run Hello World on App Engine

Visual Studio

To deploy the Hello World app:

1. Open dotnet-docs-samples\appengine\flexible\HelloWorld\HelloWorld.sln with Visual Studio.
2. In Solution Explorer, right-click HelloWorld, and choose Publish to Google Cloud...
3. Click App Engine Flex.
4. Click Publish.

5. To see your deployed app, go to the following address in your browser:

   https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com

Command Line

1. Run the following commands from the dotnet-docs-samples\appengine\flexible\HelloWorld directory:

   dotnet restore
   dotnet publish -c Release
   gcloud app deploy .\bin\Release\netcoreapp2.1\publish\app.yaml

2. Launch your browser and view the app at https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com

   gcloud app browse

This time, the page that displays the Hello World message is delivered by a web server running on an App Engine instance.

Congratulations! You've deployed your first App Engine app to the App Engine flexible environment!

If you encountered any errors deploying your application, check the troubleshooting tips.

See the following sections for information about cleaning up as well as links to possible next steps that you can take.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges, you can delete your Cloud project to stop billing for all the resources used within that project.

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:
• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for this tutorial, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.

   Go to Manage resources

2. In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.
3. In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.

What's next

Learn the whole platform

Now that you know what it's like to develop and deploy App Engine apps, you can explore the rest of Google Cloud. You already have the Google Cloud CLI installed which gives you the tools to interact with products like Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Firestore, and more.

Learn about the App Engine flexible environment

Here are some topics to help continue your learning about App Engine:

• An overview of App Engine
• Request routing
• Request handling
• Managing instances

Hello World code review

Hello World is the simplest possible App Engine app, as it contains only one service, has only one version, and all of the code is located within the app's root directory. This section describes each of the app files in detail.

Startup.cs

The Hello World app is a simple ASP.NET app:

appengine/flexible/HelloWorld/Startup.cs

View on GitHub

    public class Startup
    {
        public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
        {
            Configuration = configuration;
        }

        public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

        // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
        // For more information on how to configure your application, visit https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=398940
        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
        }

        // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
        public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
        {
            if (env.IsDevelopment())
            {
                app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
            }

            app.Run(async (context) =>
            {
                string greeting = Configuration["My:Greeting"];
                await context.Response.WriteAsync(greeting);
            });
        }
    }

app.yaml

The app.yaml file describes the following configuration for your app:

• Sets env: flex, indicating your app uses the App Engine flexible environment.

• Specifies the runtime used by the app.

  appengine/flexible/HelloWorld/app.yaml

  View on GitHub

  runtime: aspnetcore
  env: flex
  
  # This sample incurs costs to run on the App Engine flexible environment. 
  # The settings below are to reduce costs during testing and are not appropriate
  # for production use. For more information, see:
  # https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/dotnet/configuring-your-app-with-app-yaml
  manual_scaling:
    instances: 1
  resources:
    cpu: 1
    memory_gb: 0.5
    disk_size_gb: 10
  
  env_variables:
    # The __ in My__Greeting will be translated to a : by ASP.NET.
    My__Greeting: Hello AppEngine!
  

  • For more information on how the .NET runtime works, see The .NET runtime.

  • For more details about how to design your app to take advantage of versions and services, see An overview of App Engine.

  • For more details about the configuration settings for App Engine, see Configuring your app with app.yaml.