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Essential C# Web Project

Projects Overview

For any bugs, questions, or anything else with specifically the code found inside the listings (listing examples code), please submit an issue at the EssentialCSharp Repo.

Getting Started

For information on setting up your local development environment, please see the Getting Started Guide.

Please use issues or discussions to report issues found.

IndexNow Setup (Production Deployment)

The deployment workflow notifies search engines (Bing, Yandex, Naver) of content updates via the IndexNow protocol. After each successful production deploy the workflow fetches the live sitemap.xml, extracts all content URLs, and submits them in a single batch POST to IndexNow.

How It Works

  1. After the smoke test confirms the app is live, the workflow fetches https://essentialcsharp.com/sitemap.xml.
  2. All <loc> URLs are extracted and POSTed to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow.
  3. IndexNow distributes those URLs to all participating search engines (Bing, Yandex, Naver, etc.).

Setup Requirements

1. GitHub Secret

Generate a random hex key and store it in GitHub repository secrets as INDEXNOW_API_KEY. The workflow uses this value both to write the key verification file into the Docker image at build time and to authenticate IndexNow submissions.

Go to: GitHub repo → Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret

  • Name: INDEXNOW_API_KEY
  • Value: a random hex string (e.g. generate with openssl rand -hex 16)

2. Key Verification File (auto-generated at build time)

IndexNow requires domain ownership proof via a publicly accessible .txt file:

  • The workflow writes wwwroot/{key}.txt (containing the key value) before building the Docker image
  • The file is NOT committed to git — it is generated fresh on every CI run from the GitHub Secret
  • ASP.NET Core's static file middleware serves it at https://essentialcsharp.com/{key}.txt
  • IndexNow crawls that URL to verify domain ownership before accepting submissions
  • Without this file, all submissions return HTTP 403

The key file is intentionally public — that is by design. The "security" is that only the domain owner can host a file at that path.

Important Notes

  • The IndexNow step uses continue-on-error: true — a submission failure will never block a deployment
  • Submitting all sitemap URLs on every deploy is intentional; IndexNow has no hard rate limit for batch submissions and the full URL list ensures nothing is missed
  • To rotate the key: generate a new hex string and update the GitHub Secret — the old key file disappears automatically on the next deploy