Aspire documentation

What Aspire is

Aspire describes itself as a code-first tool for composing, debugging and deploying distributed applications. You describe your app in an AppHost project: your API, a front end, SQL Server, Redis, a message queue and how they connect. One command starts everything locally with the right connection strings. It started as .NET Aspire for .NET apps and is now polyglot, with support for C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, Go, Rust and containers. Its documentation lives at aspire.dev.

The dashboard

The part most .NET developers use first is the dashboard. It shows every resource in your app, live console logs, structured OpenTelemetry logs you can filter, distributed traces across services, metrics such as HTTP request duration, and health status. It is the quickest way to see what your ASP.NET Core API is doing while you develop. The dashboard can also run on its own in a container, receiving OpenTelemetry data from any app, even one that does not use the rest of Aspire.

Service defaults and integrations

Aspire's service defaults project wires up OpenTelemetry, health checks, service discovery and HTTP resilience in one call, so production-ready settings are on from the start. Integrations add databases, caches and cloud services to the AppHost with a line of code each.

Is it worth your time?

If you build ASP.NET Core services, yes, especially for local development and observability. Microsoft's own eShop reference app runs on it. You do not need the full Aspire setup to benefit: running the standalone dashboard next to an API that exports OpenTelemetry already shows traces and metrics.

How to learn it

Follow the install and first app guides, then open the dashboard and click through resources, logs, traces and metrics while you call your API. Add SQL Server and Redis to the AppHost. Read the dashboard overview and the standalone dashboard pages, then the deployment docs when you are ready to ship.

Prerequisites

Comfortable ASP.NET Core basics and a container runtime such as Docker Desktop or Podman.

Free or paid?

Free and open source under the MIT licence. Hosting what you deploy costs whatever your cloud provider charges.

What you can do after it

Run a multi-service app locally with one command, read traces and metrics to find slow requests, and understand how OpenTelemetry fits into a .NET app.