Deploy .NET apps

Clever Cloud allows you to deploy .NET web applications. This page will explain you how to set up your application to run it on our service.

You do not need to change a lot in your application, the requirements will help you to configure your apps with some mandatory files to add, and properties to setup.

.NET version

The default version used on Clever Cloud is 5.0. You can change it to 3.1 by setting the CC_DOTNET_VERSION environment variable to 3.1. No support will be provided for end-of-life versions.

Create an application on Clever Cloud

via the web console

1. Create a new app by clicking on the Add an Application button, in the sidebar.
2. Select a brand new instance (or a repository from GitHub if your account is linked).
3. Then select .NET in the platform list.
4. Configure your scaling options.
5. Enter your application’s name and description and click “Next”. You can also select the region you want (North America or Europe).

Refer to https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/getting-started/ for more details on application creation via the console.

via the Clever Tools CLI

1. Make sure you have clever-tools installed locally. Report to https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/reference/clever-tools/getting_started/
2. In your code folder, do clever create --type <type> <app-name> --region <zone> --org <org> where type is the type of technology you rely on, app-name the name you want for your application, zone deployment zone (par for Paris and mtl for Montreal), and org the organization ID the application will be created under.

Refer to https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/reference/clever-tools/create/ for more details on application creation with Clever Tools.

Necessary information

Be sure that:

• You have pushed in master branch.
• You listen on port 8080, by default each .NET application is created with the ASPNETCORE_URLS="http://0.0.0.0:8080" environment variable.
• You have committed the different files of your project and the corresponding project file (.csproj, .fsproj or .vbproj). If the project file is not at the root of the repository, you can use the APP_FOLDER environment variable. See the list of environment variables here.

Requirements

Let’s take an example with the Microsoft TodoApi project.

During deployment, the TodoApi.csproj file and the target framework netcoreapp3.1 are automatically detected. Then, the .NET project is published :

dotnet publish --framework netcoreapp3.1 --configuration Release

No additional configuration is required (unless multiple project files or target frameworks are present, see the documentation below).

Multiple project files in the repository

If multiple project files are present in your repository, you can specify the file to use (without the .*proj extension) with the CC_DOTNET_PROJ environment variable.

CC_DOTNET_PROJ=TodoApi2

Multiple binary targets

If your project file defines multiple targets, like :

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp3.0;netcoreapp3.1</TargetFramework>
  </PropertyGroup>
  ...

You must specify the one you want to run, with the CC_DOTNET_TFM environment variable. If CC_DOTNET_TFM is specified, then the executable produced by this target is used to start the application.

CC_DOTNET_TFM=netcoreapp3.1

Dependencies

Make sure to list all your dependencies in your project file. For example:

  ...
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="EntityFramework" Version="6.4.0" />
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.CodeGeneration.Design" Version="3.1.2" />
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Tools" Version="3.1.3">
      <IncludeAssets>runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive</IncludeAssets>
      <PrivateAssets>all</PrivateAssets>
    </PackageReference>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Compiled dependencies are cached by default to speed up deployments. You can disable dependencies caching completely by removing the CC_CACHE_DEPENDENCIES environment variable. If you want to rebuild your application from scratch, you can select “rebuild and restart” from the console or launch clever restart --without-cache from CLI

The configuration to publish for

Release by default, you can use the CC_DOTNET_PROFILE environment variable to change this configuration.

CC_DOTNET_PROFILE=Debug

Private dependencies

Support for private dependencies will be available soon.

Deploy on Clever Cloud

Application deployment on Clever Cloud is via Git. Follow these steps to deploy your application.

More configuration

Need more configuration? To run a script at the end of your deployment? To add your private SSH key to access private dependencies? Go check the Common configuration page.

You may want to have an advanced usage of your application, in which case we recommend you to read the Administrate documentation section.

If you can’t find something or have a specific need like using a non supported version of a particular software, please reach out to the support.