forge

Forge is an alternative deployment tool for .NET Aspire.

It also fixes dotnet watch on Aspire 9 projects until the a newer .NET SDK is out.

Getting Started

Install the tool.

dotnet tool install --global R.Forge --prerelease

Watch your AppHost project. Note that --no-hot-reload is recommended for your projects so that new files are generally picked up better, also .NET 9's dotnet watch is pretty broken.

forge fire --no-hot-reload

Reasons

azd is great but contains a lot of non-customisable magic, such as creating its own Container Registry and magical environments that aren't controllable in any way. It also only supports ACA as a deployment target.

There's also no option for creating different environments (dev/test) and having different configurations for each.

This tool will create all of the Bicep necessary for creating the entire environment as well as mimicking the azd up|deploy|provision commands in something that's repeatable without magic, after reading the manifest.

Proposed usage

• forge fire|watch [--no-hot-reload] [--apphost-build-output] - Fires up the app for local development
• forge temper|prepare [-env {dev}] - Generate the relevant configuration files
• forge forge|deploy [-env {dev}] - Meta af. Deploy to the cloud!

Goals

• Create reusable Bicep files
• Support multiple environments for deployment that can be committed to CI
• Support ACA deployment target
• Support AppService deployment target
• Add dotnet watch support back to individual projects

Raising issues

The environment variable FORGE_DEBUG=1 will enable logging, if you're posting an issue please make sure that you post the complete output (redacted project names is fine).