ASP.NET 5 Static Files - Enabling Default Files

ASP.NET 5 Static Files - Enabling Default Files

Brett M. Nelson - Saturday, January 9, 2016

Sometimes you have static resources in your webroot, wwwroot by default, that you would like to have served when a request is made to that path. For instance if you go to the root of a site you expect the index.html to be served to the browser. This can be done with ASP.NET 5 by adding a method call to UseDefaultFiles() off of our app in the Configure method of the Startup.cs.

If you followed ASP.NET 5 and Static Files for you set up you'll add the call to app.UseDefaultFiles() after the app.UseStaticFiles().

Update Configure Method
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)  
{
    app.UseIISPlatformHandler();
    app.UseDefaultFiles();
    app.UseStaticFiles(); 
}

You need to call app.UseDefaultFiles() before you call app.UseStaticFiles()

Now when you go to a root directory in your site ASP.NET will try and serve the default file.

Of course sometimes people like to be crazy and setup their own defintion of what a default file is. This is possible by passing in a DefaultFilesOptions object when you call app.UseDefaultFiles(). Options you can configure include DefaultFileNames, FileProvider, and the RequestPath. I only played around with the DefaultFileNames

I did add a using for using Microsoft.AspNet.StaticFiles; to access this without the namespacing to keep things easier to read.

app.UseIISPlatformHandler();  
var options = new DefaultFilesOptions {  
        DefaultFileNames = new List<string> { "notIndex.html" } 
    };
app.UseDefaultFiles(options);  
app.UseStaticFiles();

Making this configuration change and adding an html file titled notIndex.html to the root of my project now serves the notIndex.html when the browsers loads the root of my project. Of course I didn't add a notIndex.html to the rest of my directories so this only works for root right now.

Conclusion

Hope this helps with configuring your static file options. Have something else you are curious about let us know by leaving a comment bellow or, if you want to keep things on the down-low, send an email to me at brett@wipdeveloper.com.

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