Self Hosting Nancy

With the Nancy.Hosting.Self NuGet package you can self-host Nancy in, for example, console application or embedded in your desktop or windows service application.

After you have installed the package, create an instance of the NancyHost class and call the Start method.

using (var host = new NancyHost(new Uri("http://localhost:1234")))
{
   host.Start();
   Console.WriteLine("Running on http://localhost:1234");
   Console.ReadLine();
}

NancyHost implements the IDisposable interface and will automatically call the Stop method on the host when the application is closing. If you need more control over when the host is started and stopped, simply create an instance, without the using-statement, and explicitly call Start() and Stop() as needed.

Host Configuration

When creating an instance of NancyHost you have the ability to pass in a configuration object to customize the behavior of your host.

Below is a list of available configuration options, provided by the HostConfiguration type.

Property	Description	Default
AllowChunkedEncoding	Determines if Transfer-Encoding: Chunked is allowed for the response instead of Content-Length	true
EnableClientCertificates	Determines whether client certificates are enabled or not. When set to true the host will request a client certificate if the request is running over SSL	false
RewriteLocalhost	Determines if localhost uris are rewritten to http://+:port/ style uris to allow for listening on all ports, but requiring either a namespace reservation, or admin access	true
UnhandledExceptionCallback	Provides a callback to be called if there's an unhandled exception in the host. Note: this will not be called for normal Nancy exceptions that are handled by the Nancy handlers. The callback is of the type Action<Exception>	Write to debug window
MaximumConnectionCount	The total number of available request connections Nancy can maintain simultaneously. (Nancy 2.0)	One half of available processor thread count.
UrlReservations	Configuration around automatically creating namespace reservations	See below

The UrlReservations property provides several options that can be used to determine the behavior

Property	Description	Default
CreateAutomatically	Value indicating whether url reservations are automatically created when necessary	false
User	Value for the user to use to create the url reservations for	The Everyone group

Namespace Reservations

Windows requires applications to register the part of the HTTP URL namespace, that they will be, listening on, or for the application to run with administrator privileges. This is how the MSDN documentation describes the requirement

Namespace reservation assigns the rights for a portion of the HTTP URL namespace to a particular group of users. A reservation gives those users the right to create services that listen on that portion of the namespace. Reservations are URL prefixes, meaning that the reservation covers all sub-paths of the reservation path.

Failing to do so is going to result in an access denied, from the operating system, when the application tries to open and listen on a certain url and port. In the Nancy self-host this will result in an AutomaticUrlReservationCreationFailureException being thrown with a detailed error message, that contains information on how to resolve it.

Below is the message of the exception that was thrown for an application that tried to run Nancy on the following URLs

• http://localhost:8799/nancy/
• http://localhost:9987/nancy/

and with RewriteLocalhost setting set to true (see Host Configuration section above, for more information about the RewriteLocalhost setting)

The Nancy self host was unable to start, as no namespace reservation existed for the provided url(s).

Please either enable UrlReservations.CreateAutomatically on the HostConfiguration provided to the NancyHost, or create the reservations manually with the (elevated) command(s):

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8799/nancy/ user=<domain\username>

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:9987/nancy/ user=<domain\username>

Replace <domain\username> with your domain and username or your computer name and username if you are not joined to a domain.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733768.aspx for more information.

Another way to resolve Namespace Reservation is to use a HostConfiguration

  var hostConfigs = new HostConfiguration
        {
            UrlReservations = new UrlReservations() { CreateAutomatically = true }
        };

  Uri uri = new Uri("http://localhost:1234")
  var host = new NancyHost(hostConfigs, uri);
        host.Start();

Connection Management

Self host provides connection management via the HostConfiguration.MaximumConnectionCount property. By default this is set to one half of the logical core count (to maintain connections only on actual core threads and not the hyperthreaded count.) You may change this value and experiment with it to your needs. A general rule of thumb for this is that a higher value will mean more connections can be maintained at a slower average response time; while fewer connections will be rejected. Alternatively, lower values will result in fewer connections, yet will be maintained at a faster average response time.