Just a Few Seconds to Restart Your ASP.NET Core Application

If you host your site with shared hosting, you won’t be able to access the server. So, the question now is how can you restart your Asp.net core application if there is a problem? In this article, we will advise you how to restart your ASP.NET Core application programatically. Let’s get started!

IApplicationLifetime

With ASP.NET Core, there is an interface called IApplicationLifetime that can deal with start-up and shutdown events. It offers 3 Cancellation Token, enabling us to use Action Delegate to manage the start and stop events for the ASP.NET Core website:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, IApplicationLifetime appLifetime)
{
    appLifetime.ApplicationStarted.Register(() =>
    {
        _logger.LogInformation("Moonglade started.");
    });

    appLifetime.ApplicationStopping.Register(() =>
    {
        _logger.LogInformation("Moonglade is stopping...");
    });

    appLifetime.ApplicationStopped.Register(() =>
    {
        _logger.LogInformation("Moonglade stopped.");
    });

    // ... Other code
}

Per Microsoft document:

Cancellation Token	Triggered when…
ApplicationStarted	The host has fully started.
ApplicationStopped	The host is completing a graceful shutdown. All requests should be processed. Shutdown blocks until this event completes.
ApplicationStopping	The host is performing a graceful shutdown. Requests may still be processing. Shutdown blocks until this event completes.

Killing the Website

In addition to these three events, the IApplicationLifetime interface has a method called StopApplication() that allows the user to terminate an active ASP.NET Core application. ApplicationStopped and ApplicationStopping events are fired sequentially when a website is closed.

We can use this technique to restart our website.

Implement Restart Functionality

We can restart a website with the most ease by going to a specific URL. Consider the following ASP.NET Core MVC application:

Inject an IApplicationLifetime class into the Controller:

public class AdminController : Controller
{
    IApplicationLifetime applicationLifetime;

    public AdminController(IApplicationLifetime appLifetime)
    {
        applicationLifetime = appLifetime;
    }

    // ...
}

And use an Action to invoke the StopApplication() method:

[HttpGet("blow-me-up")]
public IActionResult BlowMeUp()
{
    applicationLifetime.StopApplication();
    return new EmptyResult();
}

Now, when I access the URL “blow-me-up“, the website will shut down itself:

And I can see the steps in log file:

It is simple to restart the application. Under IIS, the webpage will reload upon receiving the subsequent request. Which simply indicates that you should open the website in your browser once more to make it start up.

Conclusion

We hope that article can help you to restart your Asp.net core application in case you need it. To get solutions from other website errors, don’t forget to read other content from the ASPHostPortal blog.

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