Plantagoo - .NET Core restful API skeleton

This is a simple, pre-configured ASP.NET Core project, meant to be adopted and aiming to give you a head start in building restful APIs, based on the three-tier architecture.

To showcase some of its functionality, this project comes with a minimalistic and fictional implementation of a project management application called Plantagoo.

Motivation

Personally I’ve been repeatedly creating ASP.NET Core API projects from scratch over the last couple of months. Although tech is known to be changing and improving rapidly, I felt the need to create and publish this project to be able to share, reference and build upon it in the future.

Features

• Three-Tier Architecture, using Class Libraries per tier
• DI-based, asynchronous services, returning generic response object
• JWT-based authentication and authorization
• PBKDF2-based hashing
• Middleware-based global error handling
• Restful API endpoints, returning DTOs and HTTP status codes
• Implementation of filtering, paging & sorting for API endpoint, which returns lists of objects
• Implementation of API endpoint versioning
• Entity Framework Core-based data access via POCO entities
• AutoMapper-based object-to-object mapping and database query optimization
• Security-focused configurability of database connection string and JWT-parameters via environment-based „appsettings.json“-files, secrets and/or environment variables
• xUnit-based integration testing, including setup, seeding and teardown of dedicated database

Getting started

To get this project up and running as is, feel free to follow these steps:

Prerequisites

• .NET Core 3.1+ SDK
• IDE (preferably Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code)
• MySQL Server 8.0.20+

Setup

1. Clone this repository
2. At the root directory, restore required packages by running:

dotnet restore

3. Open appsettings.{environment}.json files within Plantagoo.API project to customize the following connection string to your needs (see step 7 for credentials):

server=localhost;Port=3306;database=apiSkeletonDb

4. For development purposes, enable secret storage by running (If you're used to working with environment variables, fast forward to step 7):

dotnet user-secrets init

5. If you’re on Windows, goto and open %APPDATA%\Microsoft\UserSecrets\<user_secrets_id>\secrets.json file.
6. If you're on Linux/macOS, goto and open ~/.microsoft/usersecrets/<user_secrets_id>/secrets.json file.
7. Within this secrets.json file, add the following lines to set your JWT-parameters and to extend your database connection string by adding username and password:

"TokenSettings:Secret": "…",
"TokenSettings:AccessExpirationInMinutes": "…",
"DB:Username": "…",
"DB:Password": "…"

8. For an Code-First Approach to creating the database, run the following command (make sure your current directory is Plantagoo.Data):

dotnet ef migrations add InitialCreate

9. Followed by:

dotnet ef database update

10. Next, build the solution by running:

dotnet build

11. Once done, launch the application by running:

dotnet run

12. Launch https://localhost:5001/swagger/index.html in your browser to view the Swagger documentation of your API

Technologies

• .NET Core 3.1
• ASP.NET Core 3.1
• Entity Framework Core 3.1
• AutoMapper
• Swashbuckle
• xUnit