Last Updated: 27 September 2022
Configuration in modern .Net frameworks is based on key-value pairs, and configuration providers. These providers read data from various places, combine them all together and then present them to your application.
Works with .Net Core, .Net 5, .Net 6 and Asp.Net Core projects.
Here are some of the more popular configuration providers:
If a key/value pair appears in more than one provider, the one registered last will take precedence. Usually, your app will have values set in appsettings.json
. When deploying to your test and live environments,
some of these may be transformed - for example by Octopus Deploy or some other similar mechanism. Furthermore, especically when deploying to Microsoft Azure or using Docker containers, you may additionally override
values using environment variables.
It can be troublesome to work out if the final view of your config being presented to the app is as you expect. That's where this library comes in!
Once added, on startup (or at a time of your choosing) you will see all key/value pairs listed, similar to the example log output below, depending on which ILogger
you have configured.
If the configuration provider has a file source, as the JsonConfigurationProvider
does, then the filename will also be shown, e.g. appsettings.json
and appsettings.development.json
.
A simple line added to Startup.cs
will cause a list of all config key/value pairs to be dumped out, complete with the config provider they came from. It will use whichever ILogger
implementation(s)
you are using, so works great with things such as Serilog, console or file logging.
Install the ParkSquare.ConfigDump
package using the command above, or using Visual Studio's package manager. Now add a new JSON file to your project, and call it appsettings.json
.
Build you configuration object:
Now register the required dependencies. This includes adding a logging provider, the config itself, and the config dump implementation:
At this point, you can either call .DumpConfig()
on your service collection to log out the config key/value pairs:
Alternatively, you can inject IConfigurationDumper
into your own classes and call Dump()
whenever suits you:
To use with Asp.Net Core, add the ParkSquare.ConfigDump.AspNetCore
package.
Open Startup.cs
and add the following to the ConfigureServices()
method. Make sure you use the extension method from ParkSquare.ConfigDump.AspNetCore
and not the one in ParkSquare.ConfigDump
, as it sets up additional dependencies specific to Asp.Net Core.
The call to AddConfigDump()
should be just before AddMvc()
:
When your app starts up, your config will be logged out before it starts accepting requests.
By default, your config will be logged using a log level of 'information'. If you want to change this to some other log level, such as 'debug', simply pass the required level to the .AddConfigDump()
call:
services.AddConfigDump(LogLevel.Debug);