How to Create a Minimal API in .NET Core – A Step By Step Handbook
How to Create a Minimal API in .NET Core – A Step By Step Handbook 관련
Minimal APIs are an exciting feature introduced in .NET 6, designed to revolutionize how you create APIs.
Imagine building robust APIs with minimal code and zero boilerplate—no more wrestling with controllers, routing, or middleware. That’s what minimal APIs allow you to do. The idea with these APIs is to streamline the development process, making it incredibly easy and efficient.
In this article, we'll dive into the world of minimal APIs in .NET 8 and guide you through creating a fully functional bookstore API. You'll learn how to get all books, retrieve a book by its ID, add new books, and even delete books. Let’s get started.
Prerequisites
Before we get going, make sure you have the following prerequisites installed on your machine:
- .NET 8 SDK
- Visual Studio Code or any other code editor of your choice
- C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code
Alternatively, you can use Visual Studio 2022, which comes with built-in support for .NET 8. But in this article, we'll be using Visual Studio Code. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and cross-platform.
We’ll use Swagger UI to test our API. Swagger UI is a powerful tool that allows you to interact with your API directly from your browser. It provides a user-friendly interface to test your API endpoints, making it easier to test and debug your API.
When you create a new project, it will automatically install the necessary packages and configure the project to use Swagger UI. .NET 8 includes Swagger UI by default, so whether you create your application in Visual Studio or with .NET, Swagger UI will be configured for you.
Run your application, and the Swagger UI will automatically open in your browser – but since we are using VS Code, we need to click on the port number on our terminal.
You can find the source code for this project on GitHub (Clifftech123/bookapi-minimal).
Conclusion
This handbook explored how to create a minimal API in ASP.NET Core with .NET 8. We built a comprehensive book API that supports CRUD operations, implemented custom exceptions, defined and registered API endpoints, and enabled Swagger documentation for easy testing.
Following this tutorial, you have gained a solid foundation for building minimal APIs with ASP.NET Core. You can now apply this knowledge and create robust APIs for various domains and industries.
I hope you found this tutorial both helpful and informative. Thank you for reading!
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