Default Configuration Providers In ASP.NET Core Application

One of the extremely powerful features of .Net Core is Configuration provider, which allows reading configuration data as key-value pairs from various sources like Azure Key Vault, directory files, Azure app configuration, and environment variables, to name but a few. Whenever we create a web application in .Net core, there are 5 default configuration providers that are loaded by the static method CreateDefaultBuilder () of Host Class at runtime.

You can verify it, by putting a breakpoint in the constructor of the Startup class.

We can get detailed information about each by writing a line of code in a method (e.g.: OnGet()) of a class (e.g: IndexModel.cshtml.cs).

For brevity and to keep the HTML table visible, I have removed fully qualified namespaces from the right-side column from below the image.

In the above image, there are 6 providers to distinguish from the default 5 providers, so I enabled the secret management feature of .Net core for this demo application. So, the total number of providers can vary based on your application configurations.

Built-in configuration providers read configuration data from. json/.xml file, environment variables, and command-line arguments.

All the concrete providers like jsonconfigurationprovider, commandlineconfiugrationprover etc, inherit from abstract class ConfigurationProvider which implements interface IConfigurationProvider.

Below is the code to generate the above HTML table

I hope you found this information very helpful.