Using Cloud Foundry Bound Services with SteelToe on ASP.NET Core

Before I begin, if you’re not familiar with the concept of backing services or bound services in Cloud Foundry (any of the implementations, including PCF Dev, support service bindings in some form), check out the Pivotal documentation. The short of it is that rather than your application hard-coding information about the backing services with which it communicates, it should instead externalize that configuration. One way of doing this is through Cloud Foundry’s services mechanism.

When you bind services, either user-provided or brokered, they appear in an environment variable given to your application called VCAP_SERVICES. While this is just a simple JSON value, and you could pretty easily parse it on your own, you shouldn’t have to. This is a solved problem and there’s a library available for .NET that includes as part of its foundation some DI-friendly classes that talk to Cloud Foundry’s VCAP_SERVICES and VCAP_APPLICATION environment variables.

This library is called Steel Toe. I will save the history and origin of the name Steel Toe for a future blog post. For now, you can think of Steel Toe as a set of libraries that enable ASP.NET applications to participate as clients in the Netflix OSS microservice ecosystem by talking to Configuration Server and the Discovery Server (Eureka).

So, the first thing you need to do is add a NuGet reference to the assembly SteelToe.Extensions.Configuration.CloudFoundry. To do this, you’ll have to use the feed SteelToe is on, since you won’t find it in the regular Microsoft feed. SteelToe packages can currently be found here:

• Master – https://www.myget.org/F/steeltoemaster/api/v3/index.json
• Dev – https://www.myget.org/F/steeltoedev/api/v3/index.json

Once you’ve told either your command line tools or Visual Studio 2015 where to go look for Steel Toe, you can add a reference to the Assembly mentioned above (there are more than this one, but for this blog post we’re only covering Cloud Foundry configuration).

To add Cloud Foundry’s environment variables as a configuration provider, we just use the AddCloudFoundry method in our Startup method:

 var builder = new ConfigurationBuilder()
                .AddJsonFile("appsettings.json")
                .AddEnvironmentVariables()
                .AddCloudFoundry();
 Configuration = builder.Build();

At this point we could continue and just use the syntax vcap:services:p-mysql:0:uri for raw configuration values, but I like injecting service binding information using the IOptions feature, which converts the service bindings into a collection of POCOs. To use it, our ConfigureServices method might look something like this:

  services.AddMvc();

  services.AddOptions();
  services.Configure<CloudFoundryApplicationOptions>(Configuration);
  services.Configure<CloudFoundryServicesOptions>(Configuration);

This is going to make both our application metadata and our service bindings available as injectable options. We can make use of these easily in a controller. The following is a modified “values” controller borrowed right from the Visual Studio “new project” template for ASP.NET Web API. I’ve added a constructor that allows these options to be injected:

[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class ValuesController : Controller
{
    public ValuesController(IOptions<CloudFoundryApplicationOptions> appOptions,
        IOptions<CloudFoundryServicesOptions> serviceOptions)
    {
        AppOptions = appOptions.Value;
        ServiceOptions = serviceOptions.Value;
    }

    CloudFoundryApplicationOptions AppOptions { get; set; }
    CloudFoundryServicesOptions ServiceOptions { get; set; }

    [HttpGet]
    public Object Get()
    {
        return new
        {
            AppName = AppOptions.ApplicationName,
            AppId = AppOptions.ApplicationId,
            Service = new
            {
                Label = ServiceOptions.Services[0].Label,
                Url = ServiceOptions.Services[0].Credentials["url"].Value,
                Password = ServiceOptions.Services[0].Credentials["password"].Value
            }
        };           
    }
}

Now if I bind a service to my application that has a url credential property and a password credential property, I’ll be able to see that when I issue a GET to /api/values. Here’s a sample output that I get from using the REST api for my service:

{"AppName":"bindings-example","AppId":"a605f066-8c2c-4ae3-8dbf-b2e7931fc39d","Service":{"Label":"user-provided","Url":"http://foo.bar","Password":"l33t"}}

You should try this out – create an application, copy some of the code from this blog post, push it to Cloud Foundry, and bind a couple of user-provided services to it and see how incredibly easy Steel Toe makes externalizing your backing services configuration.