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Getting Started

This document is aimed to create and run an ASP.NET Zero based project in just 5 minutes. It's assumed that you already purchased and created your ASP.NET Zero account.

Create Your Project

Login to aspnetzero.com with your username and password. Go to the download page. You will see a form as shown below:

Download Angular Project

Select ASP.NET Core & Angular as Project Type and fill other required fields. Your project will be ready in one minute. When you open the downloaded zip file, you will see four folders:

Client Server Folders

  • angular folder contains the Angular UI application which is configured to work with the angular-cli.
  • aspnet-core folder contains the server side ASP.NET Core solution and configured to work with Visual Studio.
  • ui-tests-playwright folder contains end-to-end tests for the UI using Playwright, a Node.js library for browser automation. This folder is configured to work with Visual Studio Code.

Merging Client and Server Solutions

Client and Server solutions are designed to work separately by default. If you want to work on a single Visual Studio solution, you can select "Single Solution" checkbox while downloading your project.

If you have selected this option, please follow Getting Started document for ASP.NET Core & Angular merged solution.

Pre Requirements

ASP.NET Core Application

When you open the server side solution (*.Web.sln) using Visual Studio 2017+, you will see the solution structure as below:

ASP.NET Core solution structure

If you want to work on only MAUI project, open *.Maui.sln solution. If you want to work on both of MAUI and Web projects, open *.All.sln solution.

Right click the .Web.Host project and select "Set as Startup project". Then build the solution. It may take a longer time during the first build since all nuget packages will be restored.

Database

Connection String

Open appsettings.json in .Web.Host project and change the Default connection string if you want:

"ConnectionStrings": {
    "Default": "Server=localhost; Database=PhoneBookDemoDb; Trusted_Connection=True; TrustServerCertificate=True;"
}

Migrations

We have two options to create and migrate database to the latest version.

ASP.NET Zero Migrator Application

ASP.NET Zero solution includes a .Migrator (like Acme.PhoneBookDemo.Migrator) project in the server side solution. You can run this tool for database migrations on development and production (see migrator docs for more information).

Entity Framework Migration Command

You can also use Entity Framework Core's built-in tools for migrations. Open Package Manager Console in Visual Studio, set *.EntityFrameworkCore as the Default Project and run the Update-Database command as shown below:

dotnet ef database update

This command will create your database. Initial data will be inserted when you run the *.Web.Host project. You can open SQL Server Management Studio to check if database is created:

ASP.NET Zero Database Tables

You can use EF console commands for development and Migrator.exe for production. But notice that; Migrator.exe supports running migrations in multiple databases at once, which can be useful in development/production for multi tenant applications.

Configure Multi-Tenancy

ASP.NET Zero supports multi-tenant and single-tenant applications. Multi-tenancy is enabled by default. If you don't have an idea about multi-tenancy, you can read it on wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy. If you don't want to create a multi-tenant application, you can disable it by setting PhoneBookDemoConsts.MultiTenancyEnabled to false in the *.Core.Shared project (name of the PhoneBookDemoConsts will be like YourProjectNameConsts for your project).

Run API Host

Once you've done the configuration, you can run the application. Server side application only contains APIs. When you start the application you will see a login page like below:

Swagger UI Login Page

If you log in to host application, then you will see a page like below:

Swagger UI Home Page

You can navigate to Swagger UI, Hangfire Dashboard or GraphQL Playground from this page. Note that, by default only Swagger UI and GraphQL Playground is enabled, you can enable Hangfire by following Hangfire documentation.

For example when you navigate Swagger UI, you will see following page:

Swagger UI

Angular Application

Restore Packages

Navigate to the angular folder, open a command line and run the following command to restore the packages:

pnpm install

Then, run the following command to create dynamic bundles (This is only required for the first time when you download the project or when you update dynamic bundles):

pnpm run create-dynamic-bundles

We use pnpm for fast, disk-efficient and deterministic dependency resolution. The pinned version is declared in package.json under the packageManager field, so pnpm 10+ (or Corepack, if you run corepack enable) activates the correct pnpm version automatically.

pnpm 10 or newer is required. pnpm settings live in angular/pnpm-workspace.yaml, because pnpm 11 only reads authentication and registry settings from .npmrc. pnpm 9 and older read that file as a workspace definition and fail with ERROR packages field missing or empty. If you get that error, update pnpm:

npm i -g [email protected]

Running The Application

Run the following command in the command line:

pnpm start

Once the application compiled, you can browse http://localhost:4200 in your browser. ASP.NET Zero also has also HMR (Hot Module Replacement) enabled. You can use the following command (instead of pnpm start) to enable HMR on development time:

pnpm run hmr

Troubleshooting

Could not resolve "quill-delta" / Could not resolve "parchment"

Projects generated with v15.4.0 keep the pnpm hoisting setting in angular/.npmrc (shamefully-hoist=true), but pnpm 11 only reads authentication and registry settings from .npmrc. The setting is silently ignored, and the build can no longer resolve Quill's own dependencies.

To fix it, create an angular/pnpm-workspace.yaml file with the following content:

shamefullyHoist: true
fetchTimeout: 600000

Then delete the node_modules folder and run pnpm install again.

[ERR_PNPM_IGNORED_BUILDS] on install

pnpm 10+ does not run the build scripts of dependencies unless they are approved, and an unapproved package makes pnpm install (and therefore pnpm start) fail. Run pnpm approve-builds and allow the listed packages, or add them to the allowBuilds map in pnpm-workspace.yaml:

allowBuilds:
  esbuild: true
  lmdb: true

Login

All ready! Now, you can login to the application:

Angular Login Page

If multi-tenancy is enabled, you will see the current tenant and a change link. If so, click to Change and enter default as tenant name. If you leave it empty, you login as the host admin user. Then enter admin as username and 123qwe as password (remember to change it to a more secure password on production!).

Application UI

When you login to the application as a Tenant admin, you will see the sample dashboard screen:

Dashboard

ASP.NET Zero Power Tools

ASP.NET Zero Power Tools lets you create a new page from the database to the UI layer by defining your entity properties. It creates the entity, related permissions, application services, DTOs, client-side code, menu items, database migrations, tests, and more.

Power Tools is installed as a .NET global tool and opens a web-based UI. See Power Tools Getting Started to install and run it.

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