Using .NET Aspire With the Docker Publisher
.NET Aspire is one of the most exciting additions to the .NET ecosystem in years. It delivers a modern, cloud-native development experience with strong defaults, seamless integration, and a focus on developer productivity.
A highly requested feature is the ability to publish directly to Docker Compose. With the latest preview, this feature is available, and in this guide, I’ll show you how it works.
We’ll walk through using Aspire’s Docker Publisher to spin up a demo app that includes:
- A SQL Server database
- A migration service
- A minimal .NET API
- A Shell UI
Everything runs under Docker Compose, and Aspire generates the required configuration directly from C# code. We’ll cover setup, what happens behind the scenes, and how to take this configuration to a VPS or cloud host.