Hosting ASP.NET Core on nginx and Slackware

The problem

There is a lot of documentation for hosting ASP.NET on Ubuntu, RHEL, and SUSE that all use systemd, but those of us not using systemd (such as Slackware) are left without.

Slackware uses a customized init system which consists of a collection of bash scripts in the /etc/rc.d directory. All existing documentation assumes creating a service file for use with systemd.

The Process

I've been using Slackware off and on since about 2009 so I was fairly familiar with the process of installing external packages. I got .NET 10 and nginx installed (nginx was a little troublesome, but that was on me) but still needed to figure out how to run the .NET application as a "service" to run the background.

I could get it to run from the command line, and could hit it from a browser on another network, so that was a good start. I thought maybe the rc.d initialization might somehow manage the background process (and it still might have except I needed to start it manually without rebooting).

After some research I found the command modifications I couldn't remember.

The Solution

I'll be going back to beef this up to include start/stop/restart commands, but here's the basics.

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/dotnet /path/to/asp/dll > /dev/null 2>&1 &
                

There's some discussion of using nohup but I haven't uncovered all of the details on that or if it's included in Slackware. That will be part of my next round of research. But for now, it's up and running.