Resource Publishing

Aspire provides a flexible mechanism for publishing resource manifests, enabling seamless integration with various deployment environments. Resources are serialized into JSON format, which can be consumed by deployment tools.

Custom resources that publish JSON manifest entries must:

Resources can opt-out of being included in the publishing manifest entirely by calling the ExcludeFromManifest() extension method on the IResourceBuilder<T>. Resources marked this way will be omitted when generating publishing assets like Docker Compose files or Kubernetes manifests.

Registering the callback

Consider the following example of a custom Azure Bicep resource that publishes its parameters to a manifest:

public class AzureBicepResource : Resource, IAzureResource
{
    public AzureBicepResource(string name, ...) : base(name)
    {
        Annotations.Add(new ManifestPublishingCallbackAnnotation(WriteToManifest));
    }
}

Writing to the manifest

As an example, the WriteToManifest method serializes the resource's parameters into a JSON object. This method is invoked during the manifest publishing phase:

public virtual void WriteToManifest(ManifestPublishingContext context)
{
    context.Writer.WriteString("type", "azure.bicep.v0");
    context.Writer.WriteString("path", context.GetManifestRelativePath(path));
  
    context.Writer.WriteStartObject("params");
    foreach (var kv in Parameters)
    {
        context.Writer.WritePropertyName(kv.Key);
        var v = kv.Value is IManifestExpressionProvider p ? p.ValueExpression : kv.Value?.ToString();
        context.Writer.WriteString(kv.Key, v ?? "");
        context.TryAddDependentResources(kv.Value);
    }
    context.Writer.WriteEndObject();
}

Summary table

The following table summarizes the key steps and conventions for publishing resources:

Key conventions