Barebones ASP.NET Framework Web API 2 with OWIN

A minimal, self-hosted OWIN-based Web API for .NET Framework 4.8, built from scratch on top of a Console application, without relying on Visual Studio or IIS. This project aims to demonstrate how the different ASP.NET components fit together and integrate with the OWIN/Katana pipeline.

Features

• Builds on the bare minimum .NET Framework 4.8 Console application.
• Self-hosted OWIN-based Web API with all startup logic contained in a single file (api.cs).
• Implements a simple cookie based user authentication / session using raw http headers, backed by a session table in the database.
• Avoids the complexity and ceremony of Dapper/EFCore/ORMs in favor of raw sql queries/ADO.NET.

Notes

• Developed on MSYS2 using the standalone JetBrains redistributable of MSBuild. You can also use the MSBuild executable that is included with Visual Studio if you have it installed. Just include the full path to the MSBuild exe in a script, something like this.

#!/usr/bin/zsh
set -euo pipefail

/c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Microsoft\ Visual\ Studio/2019/Professional/MSBuild/\
Current/Bin/amd64/MSBuild.exe ${@}

# or

# /path to JetBrains redistributable MSBuild/MSBuild.exe ${@}

• Tested with Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (RTM) - 15.0.2000.5 (X64).
• Needs MultipleActiveResultSets to be enabled, so include MultipleActiveResultSets=true in your connection string.
• Listening host and port need to be defined in a app_settings.config file in root. See sample_app_settings.config.
• Database connection string to be defined in a connection_strings.config file in root. See sample_connection_strings.config.
• x.sh is a simple shell script is intended to be run in a zsh shell on MSYS2/Cygwin. Reading it should help you understand how to use MSBuild to build and run this project from any cli such as Powershell or cmd.

Endpoints

Unauthenticated endpoints

hailstone

POST: /hailstone

Returns the Collatz (Hailstone) sequence for a given positive integer.

Parameters:

{
    "n": int (required)
}

env

POST: /env

List of environment variables as key-value pairs

now

POST: /now

Returns current timestamps sourced from the database (local time, Unix epoch, formatted timestamp) and the server's UTC time.

ecco

POST: /ecco

Echoes posted content with an optional delay parameter.

Parameters:

{
    "delay": int (optional),
    ...
}

login

POST: /login

Example request:

curl -vs -X POST \
  --cookie ${COOKIE_FILE_PATH} \
  --cookie-jar ${COOKIE_FILE_PATH} \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  --data-binary "$(cat <<EOL
{
  "username": string (required),
  "passwd": string (required)
}
EOL
)" \
'http://0.0.0.0:8000/login'

Authenticated endpoints

logout

POST: /logout

Example request:

curl -vs -X POST \
  --cookie ${COOKIE_FILE_PATH} \
  --cookie-jar ${COOKIE_FILE_PATH} \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
'http://0.0.0.0:8000/logout'

userid

POST: /userid

Returns the ID of the current session user.