Nancy Selfhost

[Back Post - made available on 2014-07-22]

In this post I will set-up Nancy as a windows service with the help of TopShelf.

What is Nancy first?

Nancy as is a small http framework which allows .NET developers to deliver content such as Web pages and services (RESTful) really easily.

Create project

Create a console application (I called mine TestNancy), and then add the following nuget packages:

TopShelf (3.1.1)
Nancy.Hosting.Self (0.18.0)

Set-up TopShelf

TopShelf is my favoured way to handle windows services. The following code will create and set-up a windows service

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        HostFactory.Run(
            cfg =>
            {
                cfg.Service<App>(
                    srv =>
                    {
                        srv.ConstructUsing(app => new App());
                        srv.WhenStarted(app => app.Start());
                        srv.WhenStopped(app => app.Stop());
                    });
                
                cfg.RunAsLocalSystem();
                cfg.SetServiceName("NancyWebServer");
                cfg.SetDisplayName("NancyWebServer");
            });
    }
}

Create the App class

The App class is a simple way for to encapsulate the application start and stop, at this point we will create/start the Nancy host, using Port 1234, and also close/dispose of it when we are done.

public class App
{
    NancyHost _nancyHost;

    public void Start()
    {
        _nancyHost = new NancyHost(new Uri("http://localhost:1234"));
        _nancyHost.Start();
    }

    public void Stop()
    {
        _nancyHost.Stop();
        _nancyHost.Dispose();
    }    
}

Set-up a module

Nancy uses modules to set-up the server, in this example we are going to copy the code off the wiki.

public class HelloModule : NancyModule
{
    public HelloModule()
    {
        Get["/"] = parameters => "Hello World";
    }
}

Run

Run the application, F5 should open a console application, open up you browser and navigate to http://localhost:1234, it should just display:

Hello World

Thats it, we have created a fully working hello world.

Dave R.