Configuring Your Application for Production Environments

ABP Framework has a lot of options to configure and fine-tune its features. They are all explained in their own documents. Default values for these options are pretty well for most of the deployment environments. However, you may need to care about some options based on how you've structured your deployment environment. In this document, we will highlight these kind of options. So, it is highly recommended to read this document in order to not have unexpected behaviors in your system in production.

Distributed Cache Prefix

ABP's distributed cache infrastructure provides an option to set a key prefix for all of your data that is saved into your distributed cache provider. The default value of this option is not set (it is null). If you are using a distributed cache server that is shared by different applications, then you can set a prefix value to isolate an application's cache data from others.

Configure<AbpDistributedCacheOptions>(options =>
{
    options.KeyPrefix = "MyCrmApp";
});

That's all. ABP, then will add this prefix to all of your cache keys in your application as along as you use ABP's IDistributedCache<TCacheItem> or IDistributedCache<TCacheItem,TKey> services. See the Caching documentation if you are new to distributed caching.

Warning: If you use ASP.NET Core's standard IDistributedCache service, it's your responsibility to add the key prefix (you can get the value by injecting IOptions<AbpDistributedCacheOptions>). ABP can not do it.

Warning: Even if you have never used distributed caching in your own codebase, ABP still uses it for some features. So, you should always configure this prefix if your caching server is shared among multiple systems.

Warning: If you are building a microservice system, then you will have multiple applications that share the same distributed cache server. In such systems, all applications (or services) should normally use the same cache prefix, because you want all the applications to use the same cache data to have consistency between them.

Warning: Some of ABP's startup templates are pre-configured to set a prefix value for the distributed cache. So, please check your application code if it is already configured.

Distributed Lock Prefix

ABP's distributed locking infrastructure provides an option to set a prefix for all the keys you are using in the distributed lock server. The default value of this option is not set (it is null). If you are using a distributed lock server that is shared by different applications, then you can set a prefix value to isolate an application's lock from others.

Configure<AbpDistributedLockOptions>(options =>
{
    options.KeyPrefix = "MyCrmApp";
});

That's all. ABP, then will add this prefix to all of your keys in your application. See the Distributed Locking documentation if you are new to distributed locking.

Warning: Even if you have never used distributed locking in your own codebase, ABP still uses it for some features. So, you should always configure this prefix if your distributed lock server is shared among multiple systems.

Warning: If you are building a microservice system, then you will have multiple applications that share the same distributed locking server. In such systems, all applications (or services) should normally use the same lock prefix, because you want to globally lock your resources in your system.

Warning: Some of ABP's startup templates are pre-configured to set a prefix value for distributed locking. So, please check your application code if it is already configured.

Email Sender

ABP's Email Sending system abstracts sending emails from your application and module code and allows you to configure the email provider and settings in a single place.

Email service is configured to write email contents to the standard application log in development environment. You should configure the email settings to be able to send emails to users in your production environment.

Please see the Email Sending document to learn how to configure its settings to really send emails.

Warning: If you don't configure the email settings, you will get errors while trying to send emails. For example, the Account module's Password Reset feature sends email to the users to reset their passwords if they forget it.

SMS Sender

ABP's SMS Sending abstraction provides a unified interface to send SMS to users. However, its implementation is left to you. Because, typically a paid SMS service is used to send SMS, and ABP doesn't depend on a specific SMS provider.

So, if you are using the ISmsSender service, you must implement it yourself, as shown in the following code block:

public class MySmsSender : ISmsSender, ITransientDependency
{
    public async Task SendAsync(SmsMessage smsMessage)
    {
        // TODO: Send it using your provider...
    }
}

ABP Commercial provides a Twilio SMS Module as a pre-built integration with the popular Twilio platform.

BLOB Provider

If you use ABP's BLOB Storing infrastructure, you should care about the BLOB provider in your production environment. For example, if you use the File System provider and your application is running in a Docker container, you should configure a volume mapping for the BLOB storage path. Otherwise, your data will be lost when the container is restarted. Also, the File System is not a good provider for production if you have a clustered deployment or a microservice system.

Check the BLOB Storing document to see all the available BLOB storage providers.

Warning: Even if you don't directly use the BLOB Storage system, a module you are depending on may use it. For example, ABP Commercial's File Management module stores file contents, and the Account module stores user profile pictures in the BLOB Storage system. So, be careful with the BLOB Storing configuration in production. Note that ABP Commercial uses the Database Provider as a pre-configured BLOB storage provider, which works in production without any problem, but you may still want to use another provider.

String Encryption

ABP's IStringEncryptionService Service simply encrypts and decrypts given strings based on a password phrase. You should configure the AbpStringEncryptionOptions options for the production with a strong password and keep it as a secret. You can also configure the other properties of those options class. See the following example:

Configure<AbpStringEncryptionOptions>(options =>
{
    options.DefaultPassPhrase = "gs5nTT042HAL4it1";
});

Note that ABP CLI automatically sets the password to a random value on a new project creation. However, it is stored in the appsettings.json file and is generally added to your source control. It is suggested to use User Secrets or Environment Variables to set that value.

Logging

ABP uses .NET's standard Logging services. So, it is compatible with any logging provider that works with .NET. ABP's startup solution templates come with Serilog pre-installed and configured for you. It writes logs to file system and console with the initial configuration. File system is useful for development environment, but it is suggested you to use a different provider for your production environment, like Elasticsearch, database or any other provider that can properly work.

The Swagger UI

ABP's startup solution templates come with Swagger UI pre-installed. Swagger is a pretty standard and useful tool to discover and test your HTTP APIs on a built-in UI that is embedded into your application or service. It is typically used in development environment, but you may want to enable it on staging or production environments too.

While you will always secure your HTTP APIs with other techniques (like the Authorization system), allowing malicious software and people to easily discover your HTTP API endpoint details can be considered as a security problem for some systems. So, be careful while taking the decision of enabling or disabling Swagger for the production environment.

You may also want to see the ABP Swagger integration document.