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What every ASP.NET Core Web API project needs - Part 1 - Serilog

Mohsen Esmailpour on February 27, 2021

In a series of articles, I'm going to show the implementation of an architecture that is suitable for a thin Web API project or Web API that fits i...

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Rafal Pienkowski • Mar 1 '21

Nice article.

There is one thing that you should be aware of when it comes to the Console sink. I’ve seen that you used it with the docker container.
Serilog’s Console the sink is synchronous and has no buffer. That means during the high load it slows down your application. The tread waits until the log is written. As a solution, there is an async sink nuget package. It introduces asynchronously logging and configurable buffers.
As a side note, other sinks like SQL, Application Insights are asynchronous by design.

Mohsen Esmailpour • Mar 1 '21

Yes, you right @rafal
I think using console sink with docker container it's not a good idea and doesn't make sense. I just wanted to make an example of how to override configuration. I'm going to change it with a proper example.

Rafal Pienkowski • Mar 1 '21

According to 12-factor-app it does have sense. I see your point of view. I just want to warn everyone:)

Jason Barr • Oct 14 '21

This is great, but I can't find anything on how to set up and configure Serilog in ASP.NET 6, which completely revamps the Program class (and does away with having a separate Startup class). Do you know anything about how to do that? I really need logging in an API I'm setting up for work and I can't find any information at all on configuring Serilog with ASP.NET 6.

Mohsen Esmailpour • Oct 14 '21

I haven't tried .NET 6 and minimal APIs yet but this weekend I will try and let you know If I had any luck.

Jason Barr • Oct 15 '21 • Edited

I would appreciate that! Logging is the one significant piece my app needs that I can't figure out how to set up. It's a work project.

I know, I know, building a work project on a pre-release version of .NET probably wasn't the brightest idea, but since it's an LTS it made sense to me since it will be supported for a longer time than .NET 5.

The sticking point is I can't figure out where to put UseSerilog, or what else to use if that method isn't going to work.

Mohsen Esmailpour • Oct 15 '21 • Edited

I did same thing with .NET Core RC1 :) It was very risky, but we did the project successfully.
This code works for me and try it

using Serilog;

IHostBuilder host = builder.Host
    .ConfigureDefaults(args)
    .UseSerilog((hostingContext, loggerConfiguration) =>
                    loggerConfiguration.ReadFrom.Configuration(hostingContext.Configuration)
                        .Enrich.FromLogContext());

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Jason Barr • Oct 25 '21

Well, it doesn't generate an error or crash, so that's good. When I run dotnet run it hangs, but when I run dotnet build it runs without a hitch.

Sorry for being such a n00b but this is literally my first .NET project so everything is new and uncertain.

Jason Barr • Oct 25 '21

I figured it out - I forgot to tell it in appsettings.Development.json where to output the log info. Silly beginner mistake.

Jason Barr • Oct 25 '21

Now how do I actually access the logger and use it? Do I need to create an instance somewhere or set it up for dependency injection?

Mohsen Esmailpour • Oct 25 '21

No, just inject I ILogger into classes you want to log data.

Jason Barr • Oct 26 '21

Got it working! Thanks for taking the time to help me out.

Alexis Incogito • Apr 17 '21 • Edited

That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you for putting this project together.
I already understand all of the pieces, but being unfamiliar with ASP.NET I was missing a boilerplate template that save me the time of piecing everything together, one blog/documentation at a time.

Great idea!