ASP.NET

ASP.NET is supported via the Iron Foundry.NET project. Iron Foundry is an open source project that extends .NET to any Cloud Foundry-based Platform as Service (PaaS).

.NET support via Mono is available with a Stackato add-on. Contact stackato-support@activestate.com for more information and access to the plugin.

Getting Iron Foundry

Download a copy of the Micro Iron Foundry VM, import it into your chosen hypervisor, and boot the VM. The following setup instructions refer to this distribution.

To configure a DEA Agent .NET for use with Stackato instead, follow the directions in Iron Foundry's DEA .NET Documentation.

Initial Setup

To add an Iron Foundry DEA to a existing Stackato Cluster, some minor modifications are required after you boot the Micro Iron Foundry VM.

Note

The following editing step is required for Micro Iron Foundry version 1.4 and earlier. Subsequent releases should not require this edit to setup.rb.

C:\IronFoundry\Setup\IronFoundry>notepad setup.rb

You'll find a section near the bottom starting with def stackato. Remove the section a few lines below starting with "print "Running patch..." and ending with "puts 'Done.'" (10 lines)

Save and close the file, then run it with:

C:\IronFoundry\Setup\IronFoundry>ruby setup.rb

You'll be prompted for the hostname of your Stackato VM (without the 'api.' prefix), the IP address and the administrator password (unused since the auto-patching code has been removed).

This is equivalent to the kato node attach command run on Stackato nodes.

Once the setup script finishes, you will see "ASP.NET 4.0" under "Runtimes & Frameworks" and "MS SQL" under "Available Services" in the Features section of the Stackato Management Console.

Deployment

Use framework aspdotnet for application deployments. For example:

name: blogengine
mem: 512M
framework:
    type: aspdotnet

MS SQL Data Service

The Iron Foundry VM exposes a MS SQL data service. To use it, request an mssql service in stackato.yml, manifest.yml, or when prompted by the client. For example:

services:
    blogengine-db: mssql

A connectionString attribute for this data service will be added to the Web.config file during application staging. You can view the contents of this file with the command:

stackato files appname app/Web.config

Example

Orchard CMS is an open source ASP.NET application. To try it out with Stackato, download a copy from the "Download-as-a-zip" link on the project's homepage, then unpack it in a convenient local directory. Change to the Orchard directory, then run:

stackato push orchard

• Specify "aspdontnet" for the framework
• Give the instance the default 256M of memory
• Request an "mssql" data service when prompted to "Create services to bind to 'orchard'".

Orchard's "Get Started" wizard, does not automatically use the connectionString set in the Web.config file. To use the provisioned MS SQL service, retrieve the connectionString value as described above and paste it into the setup wizard.