Scheduling and monitoring background tasks is challenging work. Every big application needs to implement background tasks to accomplish background work such as data processing, email reminders, and processing SMS queues and email queues. Windows Service is the most typical approach to meet the necessity.
Today, we are going to setup Hangfire and write some code to schedule an initial job in the ASP.NET Core project.
Hangfire is an open source library to schedule and execute background jobs in .NET applications. You'll be able to create a simple background process inside the same application pool or thread without creating separate applications. Hangfire creates background jobs in persistence storage, like MS SQL Server, Redis, MongoDb, and others, that may prevent you from from losing the job on recycling IIS pools or exception prevalence.
ASP.NET Core is now a common platform for MVC and Web API with no separate project creation needed. Let's create a new ASP.NET Core MVC project. After the project is created, install Hangfire from NuGet. You can install Hangfire either from Package Management Console or NuGet Package Manager.
Install via nuget
- PM> Install-Package HangFire
We are going to install Hangfire using NuGet Package Manager. Search the Hangfire stable version(current 1.6.7) and install in the project.
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Image 1: Nuget package manager
After successful installation, let's configure Hangfire.
Configuration
Open Startup.cs class and locate a ConfigureServices method to register Hangfire as a service.
- public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
- {
-
- services.AddHangfire(x => x.UseSqlServerStorage(Configuration.GetConnectionString("DefaultConnection")));
-
-
- services.AddMvc();
- }
Here, we are registering Hangfire with SQL Server. We must provide a connection string to locate SQL Server database named HangFireDb. DefaultConnection is a connection string name, added to appsettings.json file.
- "ConnectionStrings": {
- "DefaultConnection": "Data Source=.\\SQLEXPRESS2014;Initial Catalog=HangFireDb;Integrated Security=True;"
- }
Once the service is configured, navigate to Configure method to add below codes. Here, app.UseHangfireDashboard() will set up the dashboard. While http://<website-url>/hangfire, and app.UseHangfireServer() will register a new instance for
BackgroundJobServer.
- public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory)
- {
- loggerFactory.AddConsole(Configuration.GetSection("Logging"));
- loggerFactory.AddDebug();
-
- app.UseHangfireDashboard();
- app.UseHangfireServer();
-
- app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
- app.UseBrowserLink();
-
- app.UseStaticFiles();
- app.UseMvc(routes =>
- {
- routes.MapRoute(
- name: "default",
- template: "{controller=Home}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
- });
- }
Now, let's run the application. Hangfire dashboard is available in browser by hitting
http://<website-url>/hangfire url.
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Image 2: Hangfire Dashboard.
Hangfire offers integrated web monitoring UI, which is used to control any aspect of background job processing, as well as statistics, exceptions, and background job history.
When the Hangfire Server starts, it'll look for a configured database and check for the required database schema. If the schema doesn't exist, it creates a schema. The below image shows a list of schemas created when running the application.
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Image 3: Hangfire database schema
How does it work?
Hangfire handles different types of background jobs, and all of them are invoked in a separate execution context.
With Hangfire, you can create the following-
Fire and forget
Fire and forget jobs are executed once on an immediate basis after creation. Once you create a fire-and-forget job, it is saved to its queue ("default" by default, but multiple queues supported). The queue is listened to by a couple of dedicated workers that fetch a job and perform it.
- BackgroundJob.Enqueue(() => Console.WriteLine("Fire-and-forget Job Executed"));
Delayed
After the given delay, the job will be put in its queue and invoked as a regular fire-and-forget job.
- BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => Console.WriteLine("Delayed job executed"), TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1));
Recurring
Recurring jobs will recur on every defined interval.You can define intervals from milliseconds to years.
- RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(() => Console.WriteLine("Minutely Job executed"), Cron.Minutely);
Continuations
Continuations allow you to define complex workflows by chaining multiple background jobs together. Here, the second job is queued with the first job.
- var id = BackgroundJob.Enqueue(() => Console.WriteLine("Hello, "));
- BackgroundJob.ContinueWith(id, () => Console.WriteLine("world!"));
After running the application, we have interesting results in a dashboard.
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Image 4: A list of succeeded jobs
As you can see, dashboard gives meaningful information like a list of successive jobs with Id, name, executed time, and duration. Re-queuing jobs feature has been provided to re-fire selected job from the list.
Following are the screenshots for various kinds of background jobs.
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Image 6: Delayed job example
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Image 7: Continuations job example
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Image 8: Continuations dependent job example
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Image 9: Recurring job example
Change the Dashboard URL
By default, Hangfire is set on http://<website-url>/hangfire to access the dashboard. It's easy to configure your custom URL.
- app.UseHangfireDashboard("/dashboard");
Access Remotely
Default Hangfire configuration sets up for local environment only. To make Hangfire work on production environment, we need to implement custom IAuthorizationFilter. So, our code is now changed to this.
- app.UseHangfireDashboard("/dashboard", new DashboardOptions
- {
- Authorization = new [] { new HangireAuthorizationFilter() }
- });
Everything will work fine now.
Summary
In this article, we've learned how to configure Hangfire in ASP.NET Core. We composed some code to queue the background jobs using Hangfire in ASP.NET Core. I emphatically favor Hangfire, as it is very easy to implement and the dashboard allows you to monitor and control any aspect of background job processing, as well as statistics, exceptions, and background job history.