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LittleBlocks is a set of libraries that facilitate different aspects of a Restful/Microservice API and takes away the boilerplate configuration/bootstrap code that needs to be written each time a new API project is a setup. There are up's and down's to this approach, however, the benefit of this approach is to set up consistent API projects faster and easier.

Boilerplate API provides the following features:

• Global Error Handling
• Preconfigured Logging to a rolling file and log aggregators such as Loggly and seq
• Application/Common services preregistration within IOC container
• Hosting as IIS or Windows Service
• Request Correlation
• Preconfigured MVC pipeline
• FluentValidation framework integration
• AutoMapper integration with desired IOC container
• RestEase REST client integration
• Open API integration
• Health endpoint exposed
• Diagnostics endpoint
• Observability

For using the full benefit of the library, Create a simple asp.net core project and install LittleBlocks.AspNetCore.Bootstrap NuGet package.

dotnet add package LittleBlocks.AspNetCore.Bootstrap

or
 
Install-Package LittleBlocks.AspNetCore.Bootstrap

In order to achieve all of this functionality you merely need a few lines of code. At this point your Program.cs should look like this:

    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            HostAsWeb.Run<Startup>(s =>  s.ConfigureLogger<Startup>());
        }
    }

And startup.cs as follows:

   public class Startup
   {
       public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
       {
           Configuration = configuration;
       }

       private IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

       public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
       {
           services.BootstrapApp<Startup>(Configuration,
                           app => app
                               .HandleApplicationException<TemplateApiApplicationException>()
                               .AddServices((container, config) => { })
                       );
       }

       public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory)
       {
           app.UseDefaultApiPipeline(Configuration, env, loggerFactory);
       }
   }

The project/solution is ready to be running in visual studio or using dotnet cli.

As you may see there are quite a few features enabled with very few lines of code. Let us take a deeper look at the template and let see what else it offers. Here is a list of topics we will be discussing in detail, so please feel free to skip to any section you maybe interested in:

• Configuration API
• Logging
• Hosting
• Exception Handling
• Object Mapping
• Validation
• Request Correlation
• REST Client
• Cors
• IOC
• Authentication
• API Documentation
• Testing
• Observability

Also, there are a couple of useful interfaces, tools, and utilities which you can use which they are already available in the framework.

• Core Services