dotnet mvc on Oracle ACCS

In this article, I’m going to briefly walk through how to create and deploy a .net mvc sample app in Oracle Application Container Cloud Service.

Assumptions:

• you have an Oracle Cloud account, it can be the promotion trial account
• you have dotnet core installed on your local machine – I’m using dotnet 2.0.0 on MacOS
• you have the corresponding editor / tools, e.g. I’m using VS Code.

1. Launch VS Code and open the embedded Terminal. Alternatively, you can also use your favorite editor and/or the OS Terminal (in Windows, that will be the Command Window).

2. Create and goto (mkdir/cd)  your desire folder and create the mvc project – I will call the project accssample:

mkdir accssample
cd accssample
dotnet new mvc

1. Open Program.cs file of the project, add .UseContextRoot( )  and .UseUrls( ) in the CreateDefaultBuilder

.UseContentRoot(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory())

.UseUrls("http://*:"+ Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PORT"))

Remember to save the changes.

1. Use the terminal to update the project dependencies and create a debug build for local testing.

dotnet restore
dotnet build

1. Test the program locally

export PORT=8080
dotnet run

Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080 to test the app locally

1. Once we are happy with the app, we can create the release build. We will need to publish to Linux release for ACCS.

dotnet publish -c Release -r linux-x64

1. For ACCS to start the program, we will create 2 more files in the distribution (i.e. linux-x64) folder

start.sh
manifest.json

Right click the linux-x64 folder and choose new file, name the first file as manifest.json

1. Enter the contents of manifest and remember to save it. For more info about ACCS manifest, please refer to ACCS documentation https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/app-container-cloud/dvcjv/creating-meta-data-files.html

1. Repeat the same for the start.sh

1. In the terminal window, zip the release, start.sh and manifest.

cd bin/Release/netcoreapp2.0/linux-x64/
zip -rq accssample.zip manifest.json start.sh publish

1. The application is now ready to deploy to ACCS. We can either use Web GUI, CLI or REST API to deploy the app.

I’ve a small shell script to execute curl to send REST to deploy the app. I also have a deployment.json file to control the memory and number of instance of the app. The deployment json looks like this

{
        "memory":"1G",
        "instances":"1"
}

this is what I did to deploy the app to ACCS,

and this is what my script looks like – what I actually do is

• create a storage container
• put my the zip file in the container
• create an ACCS app from zip (in storage container)

1. We can double check the application deployment from ACCS WebUI (or using CLI / REST API)

1. Our sample app is now up and running in ACCS.

Author: kennethheung

Solution Architect for Cloud, Security and Cloud Security. View all posts by kennethheung