Minimal ASP.NET Core Web App (Razor Pages) template

This template consists of a single content page (Index) with layout and error pages. For information about the remaining pages and code files, see the article Get started with Razor Pages in ASP.NET Core or the README file of MiniRazor.Template (more about that repository below).

Background

I needed to create a basic Web application - a single page with a few controls and an API call. I enjoyed working with Azure Functions, the related Core Tools package and VS Code, seemlessly switching between Windows and Ubuntu machines, so I decided to use .NET Core for the Web application. Razor Pages appeared on my radar a few times recently.

New project

With .NET Core SDK (v2.1.301) installed, I executed dotnet new razor and was surprised with a new project that was way more complex than I expected. You can check the inital import to see what I mean - I needed a simple scaffolding and got a full-blown application.

I looked for a dotnet new razor option to generate a more basic project, but - finding none - I decided to strip it down to a bare minimum manually. This is why this repository was created.

During this reasearch, I somehow missed MiniRazor.Template that I highly recommend:

• it allows to generate a NuGet package and install it locally,
• the template includes even fewer files than mine,
• the role of every file is nicely explained.

The road to the minimal template

I looked for unimportant elements, removed them and the unreferenced pieces left behind:

• pages:
  • _ValidationScriptsPartial (a reference to the jQuery validation scripts)
  • Contact
  • About
  • Privacy (along with some cookie consent code)
• libraries:
  • Bootstrap
  • jQuery
• images
• most of CSS styling

I kept the directory structure inside wwwroot.

Publishing to Azure

Out of different deployment options available for Web apps, I picked Local Git Repository. After the initial configuration, all I need to do is run git push azure master on my computer and the latest version is deployed. Option GitHub is also trivial to configure and later every time you push new code to the GitHub, it gets automatically deployed to Azure.

For details, refer to the article Publishing a Web Core app to Azure with CLI.