FeatherHttp, a lighter http server for DotNetCore

Earlier this year, The NancyFX Team announced Nancy was no longer being maintained

I did like the simplicity of NancyFx. Sure setting up a DotNetCore WebApi is not that demanding, but its a little bit too much ceremony for when you need to create a lightweight api to work with a frontend framework such as Vue.

With Nancy you could easily and quickly map some code to a rest endpoint. e.g.

    public class ApiModule :NancyModule
    {
        public ApiModule() :base("/api")
        {
            Get["/Info"] = parameters => new ApiInfo()
            {
                Title = "NancyApiDemo",
                Version = "1.0.0",
                Copyright = "Eamonn Flynn 2020"
            };
        }
    }

with the example above, You can request this using Postman, Curl or similar tool.

A few months ago, I came across a project on David Fowler's Git Hub called FeatherHttp. It was a very early beta.

The project has its own Github account now. There is also a dotnet new template

Below is an example how to replicate the code shown above using FeatherHttp

using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Builder;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http;

namespace FeatherHttpDemo
{
    internal class Program
    {
        private static async Task Main(string[] args)
        {
            var app = WebApplication.Create(args);

            app.MapGet("/api/info", async http =>
            {
                var apiInfo = new
                {
                    Title = "FeatherHttp Api Demo",
                    Version = "1.0.0",
                    Copyright = "Eamonn Flynn 2020"
                };

                await http.Response.WriteJsonAsync(apiInfo);
            });

            await app.RunAsync();
        }
    }
}

As its names suggests its a really quick and light way, combined together with EFCore InMemory database to construct a simple test back end api to build out a front end app.