What is Aspire?

Aspire streamlines building, running, debugging, and deploying distributed apps. Picture your app as a set of services, databases, and frontends—when they’re deployed, they all work together seamlessly, but every time you develop them they need to be individually started and connected. With Aspire, you get a unified toolchain that eliminates complex configs and makes local debugging effortless. Instantly launch and debug your entire app with a single command. Ready to deploy? Aspire lets you publish anywhere—Kubernetes, the cloud, or your own servers. It’s also fully extensible, so you can integrate your favorite tools and services with ease.

Key Benefits

• Unified Development Experience: Launch and debug your entire distributed application with a single command.
• Code-First Configuration: Define your app’s architecture in code—no complex config files required.
• Local Orchestration: Automatically handle service startup, dependencies, and connections during development.
• Deployment Flexibility: Deploy to Kubernetes, cloud providers, or your own servers using the same architecture definition.
• Extensible: Integrate with your favorite tools and services through a rich ecosystem of integrations.

How Aspire Works

Aspire uses a code-first approach to define your application’s architecture. Instead of managing complex configuration files, you describe your services, databases, and dependencies directly in code. This approach provides several advantages:

• Type Safety: Catch configuration errors at compile time.
• Statement Completion Support: Get code completion and documentation while defining your architecture.
• Version Control: Your infrastructure definition lives alongside your code.
• Refactoring: Use familiar development tools to restructure your application architecture.

Discover how Aspire powers your applications through its AppHost.

Development vs Production

Aspire bridges the gap between development and production environments:

• Development: Run services locally with automatic dependency management and service discovery
• Production: Deploy the same architecture definition to various cloud platforms and orchestrators
• Consistency: Ensure your local development environment matches your production topology

Aspire doesn’t replace your existing deployment workflows—it enhances them by providing a consistent way to define and manage your application architecture across environments.

Learn more about Deployment and App Topology.