Default Configuration Providers In ASP.NET Core Application

In this blog, you will learn to find out default configuration providers in asp.net core.

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.

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
              Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)

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).

IEnumerable<IConfigurationProvider> configurationProviders = ((ConfigurationRoot)_configuration).Providers;

 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

<table border="1" style="border:1px solid black;">
    @{
        int configProviderCounter = 0;

    }
    <tr>
        <td> No </td>
        <td>File Name</td>
        <td> <b>Concrete Class</b> </td>
    </tr>
    @foreach (IConfigurationProvider configProvider in Model.ConfigProviders)
    {
        configProviderCounter = configProviderCounter + 1;
        <tr>
            <td>@configProviderCounter</td>
            <td> @configProvider.ToString() </td>
            <td> @configProvider.GetType().ToString().Substring(configProvider.GetType().ToString().LastIndexOf(".") + 1) </td>
        </tr>

    }
</table>

I hope you found this information very helpful.