Server Overview

Grapevine is a fast, unopinionated, embeddable, minimalist web framework for .NET. Grapevine is not intended to be a replacement for IIS or ASP.NET, but rather to function as an embedded REST/HTTP server in non-ASP.NET projects.

Grapevine listens for incoming requests and routes them to specific functions and methods in your code
Grapevine can serve static HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images, as well as other static assets

Inspiration#

Grapevine is modeled after my experience using the popular Node.js library Express, which was itself inspired by the Ruby Sinatra library. When an incoming request is received, the request and response objects (collectively part of the IHttpContext object) gets routed to all matching routes until one of them sends a response - after which no more routes are invoked. If no matching routes are found, or if no route responds, then a Not Implemented response is sent.

Getting Started#

Grapevine is easy to get started with.

Create a simple route. This is the code that you want to run when a request comes in using the specificed HTTP verb and path. Route methods must be asynchronous!

The only argument to your method is an IHttpContext object. This contains (among other things) the request and response objects. Since at least one of our route methods should respond to the request, we'll do that in this method.

[RestResource]
public class MyResource
{
    [RestRoute("Get", "/api/test")]
    public async Task Test(IHttpContext context)
    {
        await context.Response.SendResponseAsync("Successfully hit the test route!").ConfigureAwait(false);
    }
}

tip

Consult this guide to see if .ConfigureAwait(false) is right for you.

Next, create your first server using provided defaults with the RestServerBuilder class and start your server up!

using (var server = RestServerBuilder.UseDefaults().Build())
{
    server.Start();

    Console.WriteLine("Press enter to stop the server");
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Open your prefered browser and go to http://localhost:1234/api/test. You should see the following output in your browser:

Successfully hit the test route!

note

Grapevine use Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection for dependency injection and Microsoft.Extensions.Logging for logging. The default RestServer implementation is a wrapper for the ubiquitous HttpListener class, although it is possible to create an implementation that does not have this dependency.