Get started with the Azure App Service integration

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Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. Aspire apps run locally during development but require scalable, production-ready infrastructure for staging and production. The Aspire Azure App Service integration lets you model an App Service environment (App Service Plan) as a first-class resource in your AppHost and automatically deploy web-facing project resources and Dockerfile-backed containers to it.

Why use Azure App Service with Aspire

Adding an Azure App Service environment through Aspire — rather than configuring deployment infrastructure by hand — gives you:

• Zero extra local setup. During development your projects run locally as usual. The App Service environment is only provisioned when you publish.
• Automatic deployment targeting. Once an App Service environment is in your AppHost, all supported compute resources (project resources and Dockerfile-backed containers) are deployed to it automatically — no extra wiring required.
• Optional customization. Use PublishAsAzureAppServiceWebsite (C#) or publishAsAzureAppServiceWebsite (TypeScript) only when you need to customize the generated website — for example to add application settings, tags, or deployment slots.
• Deployment slots. Stage changes safely by configuring a named deployment slot for the environment so that new deployments land in staging before you swap them to production.
• Bicep-backed provisioning. The hosting integration generates all required Azure resources — App Service Plan, Azure Container Registry, and managed identity — from the same C# or TypeScript AppHost code. No hand-authored Bicep required.

How the pieces fit together

Azure App Service is a deployment target, not a data service. There is no client library to install in consuming apps. Instead, the hosting integration wires the App Service environment into the Aspire manifest so that aspire deploy knows where to send each compute resource.

architecture-beta

  group apphost(server)[AppHost]
  group azure(cloud)[Azure]

  service hosting(server)[Hosting integration] in apphost
  service env(server)[App Service environment] in apphost
  service project(server)[Project or container resource] in apphost

  service plan(server)[App Service Plan] in azure
  service acr(database)[Container Registry] in azure
  service website(server)[App Service website] in azure

  hosting:R --> L:env
  env:R --> L:project
  project:R --> L:website
  website:B --> T:plan
  website:B --> T:acr

Getting there is a two-step process: model the App Service environment in your AppHost, then understand how your deployed apps read their runtime configuration.

1. Set up App Service in your AppHost

   Add the Azure App Service hosting integration to your AppHost, then declare an App Service environment. The Azure App Service Hosting integration article walks through every capability — deployment slots, infrastructure customization, application settings, and more — with side-by-side C# and TypeScript examples.

   Set up App Service in the AppHost

2. Runtime configuration in deployed apps

   When Aspire deploys a project to App Service, it injects connection strings and resource references as environment variables — the same values your app reads locally. See Azure App Service runtime configuration for details on how deployed apps consume those environment variables.

   Runtime configuration

See also

• Local Azure provisioning
• Deploy your first Aspire app