Kestrel for .NET CORE

 The KESTREL is the new default web server that is included in the ASP.NET Core project templates. It runs within the application process making it completely self-contained.

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Table of Content

What is Kestrel?

Why Kestrel

Using Kestrel

There are two ways you can use the Kestel

Self Hosting

Behind another Webserver

Benefits of Kestrel Web Server

Alternatives to Kestrel

Summary

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What is Kestrel?

The Kestrel is open-source, cross-platform, event-driven, asynchronous I/O based HTTP server. It is developed to host ASP.NET Core applications on any platform. It is included by default in the ASP.NET Core applications.

It is based on libuv

Kestel is an Open source library and is available at GitHub

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Why Kestrel

The older ASP.NET applications are tightly coupled to the Internet Information Services or IIS.

The IIS is a complete web server with all the features that you require out of a Web Server. Over the period it has grown into a matured web server and along the way, it has added a lot of weight and bloat. It has become one of the best Web servers around and at the same time, it is one of the slowest.

ASP.NET being tightly coupled with IIS carried the burden of the IIS

The newly designed ASP.NET Core applications are now completely decoupled from the IIS. This decoupling makes ASP.NET Core run on any platform making it truly cross-platform

But, it still needs to have the ability to listen to HTTP requests and send the response back to the Client. That is where Kestrel comes in.

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Using Kestrel

The Kestrel runs in in-process in the ASP.NET Core Applications. Hence, It runs independently of the environment in which it lives. The kestrel Web server is available in the namespace Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel

We looked at the program and startup class in the tutorial Application startup in ASP.NET Core

The Program class contains a static void Main function, which is the entry point to our Application.

public class Program

{

    public static void Main(string[] args)

    {

        BuildWebHost(args).Run();

    }

 

    public static IWebHost BuildWebHost(string[] args) =>

        WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)

        .UseStartup<Startup>()

        .Build();

}

The Main method invokes CreateDefaultBuilder, which is responsible to create the web application host.

The CreateDefaultBuilder is a helper method ( click here for the source code)

It calls the UseKestrel method to registers the Kestrel as the server that will be used to host our application.

There are two ways you can use the Kestel

1. By Itself (Self Hosting)
2. Behind another Webserver

Self Hosting

Under Self Hosting model the ASP.NET Core applications directly listen to the HTTP Requests from the internet as shown in the image below.

The following image shows how to use dotnet run cli command to start the kestrel web server. To run all you need to do is to go to the project folder, where .csproj file is found and run the following command

1 2 3

dotnet run

The kestrel starts and listens on port 5000/5001.

Another way is to go to the published folder and run the following command, which will fire up the kestrel server.

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dotnet helloWorld.dll

Behind another Webserver

Kestrel is not a fully-featured web server. But that is what makes it fast.

It is not advisable to run Kestrel as a standalone web server in the Production environment. It is recommended to run it behind a Fully Featured Web server like IIS, Nginx, Apache, etc. In such a scenario, the Web server acts as a reverse proxy server

The reverse proxy server takes the HTTP request from the internet and passes it to the kestrel server just the way it is received.

The IIS can take the HTTP request and perform some useful processing like logging, request filtering, URL rewrites before passing the request to Kestrel.

The following diagram shows how it is implemented

There are many reasons why you should use this model in the production

1. Security
2. It can limit your exposed surface area. It provides an optional additional layer of configuration and defense.
3. Simplifies Load Balancing
4. SSL Setup
   Only your reverse proxy server requires an SSL certificate, and that server can communicate with your application servers on the internal network using plain HTTP.
5. Sharing Single IP with Multiple addresses
6. Request FIltering, logging & URL Rewrites, etc.
7. It can make sure that the application restarts if it is crashes

The CreateDefaultBuilder method calls the UseIISIntegration, which tells ASP.NET that the application will be using the IIS as a reverse proxy in front of Kestrel

Benefits of Kestrel Web Server

1. Kestrel is fast. It is not a fully-featured website and does not provide the many features that you expect from a standard web server. Hence it makes it lightweight in design and fast.
2. Is supports all the versions of .NET Core
3. It is cross-platform. You can run it on Windows/Linux or Mac. This is something the ASP.NET missed always
4. It is very simple to configure and run. In fact, it is already configured, when you create a new ASP.NET Core project in Visual Studio
5. Supports HTTPS
6. Supports HTTP/2 (except on macOS. But will be supported in a future release).

Alternatives to Kestrel

The Kestrel is not the only way to host ASP.NET Core applications. There is another webserver implementation available in Windows known as HTTP.SYS

The HTTP.sys  is a Windows-only HTTP server based on the Http.Sys kernel driver.

Here is a nice tutorial on How to use HTTP sys.

Summary

In this tutorial, we learned about the Kestrel Web server. Kestrel is an In-Process web server built to run ASP.NET Core applications on any Platform.