Containerize a .NET application

Table of contents

Prerequisites

You have installed the latest version of Docker Desktop .
You have a git client . The examples in this section use a command-line based git client, but you can use any client.

Overview

This section walks you through containerizing and running a .NET application.

Get the sample applications

In this guide, you will use a pre-built .NET application. The application is similar to the application built in the Docker Blog article, Building a Multi-Container .NET App Using Docker Desktop .

Open a terminal, change directory to a directory that you want to work in, and run the following command to clone the repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/docker/docker-dotnet-sample

Now that you have an application, you can use docker init to create the necessary Docker assets to containerize your application. Inside the docker-dotnet-sample directory, run the docker init command in a terminal. docker init provides some default configuration, but you'll need to answer a few questions about your application. Refer to the following example to answer the prompts from docker init and use the same answers for your prompts.

$ docker init
Welcome to the Docker Init CLI!
This utility will walk you through creating the following files with sensible defaults for your project:
  - .dockerignore
  - Dockerfile
  - compose.yaml
  - README.Docker.md
Let's get started!
? What application platform does your project use? ASP.NET Core
? What's the name of your solution's main project? myWebApp
? What version of .NET do you want to use? 6.0
? What local port do you want to use to access your server? 8080

You should now have the following contents in your docker-dotnet-sample directory.

├── docker-dotnet-sample/
│ ├── .git/
│ ├── src/
│ ├── .dockerignore
│ ├── compose.yaml
│ ├── Dockerfile
│ ├── README.Docker.md
│ └── README.md

To learn more about the files that docker init added, see the following:

Run the application

Inside the docker-dotnet-sample directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:8080 . You should see a simple web application.

In the terminal, press ctrl + c to stop the application.

Run the application in the background

You can run the application detached from the terminal by adding the -d option. Inside the docker-dotnet-sample directory, run the following command in a terminal.

$ docker compose up --build -d

Open a browser and view the application at http://localhost:8080 . You should see a simple web application.

In the terminal, run the following command to stop the application.

$ docker compose down

For more information about Compose commands, see the Compose CLI reference .

Summary

In this section, you learned how you can containerize and run your .NET application using Docker.

Related information:

Next steps

In the next section, you'll learn how you can develop your application using Docker containers.

Develop your application