Customizing HostedServices ASP.​NET Core

This part is about a feature you can use to create background services to run tasks asynchronously inside your application. Actually I use this feature to regularly fetch data from a remote service in a small ASP.NET Core application.

Category Fundamentals

Published: 28 November 2020

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About HostedServcices

HostedServices are a new thing in ASP.NET Core 2.0 and can be used to run tasks in the asynchronously in the background of your application. This can be used to fetch data periodically, do some calculations in the background or some cleanups. This can also be used to send preconfigured emails or whatever you need to do in the background.

HostedServices are basically simple classes, which implements the IHostedService interface.

public class SampleHostedService : IHostedService
{
    public Task StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
    }
    
    public Task StopAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
    }
}


A HostedService needs to implement a StartAsync() and a StopAsync() method. The StartAsync() is the place where you implement the logic to execute. This method gets executed once immediately after the application starts. The method StopAsync() on the other hand gets executed just before the application stops. This also means, to start a kind of a scheduled service you need to implement it by your own. You will need to implement a loop which executes the code regularly.

To get a HostedService executed you need to register it in the ASP.NET Core dependency injection container as a singleton instance:

services.AddSingleton<IHostedService, SampleHostedService>();

To see how a hosted service work, I created the next snippet. It writes a log message on start, on stop and every two seconds to the console:

public class SampleHostedService : IHostedService
{
    private readonly ILogger<SampleHostedService> logger;
    
    // inject a logger
    public SampleHostedService(ILogger<SampleHostedService> logger)
    {
        this.logger = logger;
    }

    public Task StartAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        logger.LogInformation("Hosted service starting");

        return Task.Factory.StartNew(async () =>
        {
            // loop until a cancalation is requested
            while (!cancellationToken.IsCancellationRequested)
            {
                logger.LogInformation("Hosted service executing - {0}", DateTime.Now);
                try
                {
                    // wait for 3 seconds
                    await Task.Delay(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2), cancellationToken);
                }
                catch (OperationCanceledException) { }
            }
        }, cancellationToken);
    }

    public Task StopAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        logger.LogInformation("Hosted service stopping");
        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }
}


To test this, I simply created a new ASP.NET Core application, placed this snippet inside, register the HostedService and started the application by calling the next command in the console:

dotnet run


As you can see the log output is written to the console every two seconds.


Conclusion

You can now start to do some more complex thing with the HostedServices. Be careful with the hosted service, because it runs all in the same application. Don't use to much CPU or memory, this could slow down your application.

For bigger applications I would suggest to move such tasks in a separate application that is specialized to execute background tasks. A separate Docker container, a BackroundWorker on Azure, Azure Functions or something like this. However it should be separated from the main application in that case.