AppPipe.Hosting (a lightweight .NET Aspire alternative) uses ModularPipelines for on-premises deployments

[SitholeWB]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a project I've been working on called AppPipe.Hosting, which is built on top of ModularPipelines.

What is AppPipe.Hosting?

AppPipe is a lightweight, zero-container-dependency alternative to the .NET Aspire dashboard and gateway runner. While .NET Aspire is heavily container-centric and cloud-first, AppPipe is designed specifically for traditional, bare-metal, or on-premises servers across Windows (IIS, Windows Services) and Linux (systemd, Nginx, Caddy).

It features a beautiful HTML5/Razor Pages dashboard to view telemetry (traces, logs, metrics) and YARP-based gateway discovery out of the box—both of which can be completely deployed on-premises.

How we use ModularPipelines

To handle publishing and target machine configurations, we built a custom deployment pipeline engine using ModularPipelines.

When a user runs a deployment command (e.g., dotnet run -- --deploy iis), AppPipe constructs a pipeline using strongly-typed ModularPipelines modules to:

1. Publish the microservices and AppHost projects.
2. Stop and clean up target processes/IIS AppPools (managing self-healing file locks).
3. Configure IIS AppPools, register sub-applications, or register Windows Services natively.
4. Generate Linux systemd units, Nginx location blocks, and Caddy configurations.

Using ModularPipelines made orchestrating these asynchronous, cross-platform tasks incredibly clean and easy to test locally! The dependency model ([DependsOn]) and logging safety features fit our use case perfectly.

Showcasing / README

If you have a showcase or "Built with ModularPipelines" section in the future, I'd love to submit a PR to add the project!

Thank you @thomhurst for building and maintaining such an awesome C# pipeline library!