ASP.NET Core Backend + Astro Frontend

This repository contains two main projects:

• Backend: ASP.NET Core Web API (serves APIs in Development and frontend + API's in Production).
• Frontend: Astro application (served via dev server in development; built and served from wwwroot in production).

Project Structure

/docs-next
├──ClientApp/ # Astro frontend
├──Server/ # ASP.NET Core Backend
└──...

Development Setup

1. Prerequisites

• .NET 9 SDK
• Node.js (LTS or latest)
• npm

2. Install dependencies

Backend

cd Source/SuperOffice.DocsNext
dotnet restore

Frontend

cd Source/SuperOffice.DocsNext/ClientApp
npm install

3. Clone external repos

You can either

1. Manually clone or copy files of SuperOfficeDocs/superoffice-docs and SuperOfficeDocs/contribution repos into ClientApp/src/external-content

2. Use following script to clone or update the required external GitHub repositories into the ClientApp/src/external-content/ directory. If a repository folder already exists, script will fetch and reset it to the latest commit on the main branch.

   cd Source/SuperOffice.DocsNext/ClientApp/build
   node setup-external-repos.js

4. Run Development Servers

Backend (with API and proxy to frontend)

From docs-next/Source/SuperOffice.DocsNext:

dotnet run

By default API runs at: http://localhost:5215/api. Any non-API request is proxied to the frontend dev server.

Frontend (Astro dev server)

From docs-next/Source/SuperOffice.DocsNext/ClientApp:

npm run dev

By default Frontend dev server runs at: http://localhost:4321. The backend proxies requests to it, so you only need to visit: http://localhost:5215

/api/... → handled by backend.

Any other path → served by Astro dev server.

Reduce content during development (dev:partial)

To manage the content during development, npm command to run dev server with reduced content was introduced. This is useful when you only need to run the development server without the content from superoffice-docs. It uses a pre-defined enviornment variable (PARTIAL_BUILD) to disable content collections from rendering.

npm run dev:partial

5. Run Production Build

1. Build Backend (includes frontend)

From root:

dotnet publish -c Release -o out

2. Run Published App

cd out
dotnet docs-next.dll

API: https://localhost:5001/api/... Frontend: served from wwwroot

Partial frontend build (build:partial)

To reduce build time when testing a build, npm command to do partial builds was introduced. This is useful when you only need to build the frontend without the content from superoffice-docs. It uses a pre-defined enviornment variable (PARTIAL_BUILD) to disable content collections from building.

npm run build:partial

Notes

In development, run both servers:

dotnet run (backend + proxy)

npm run dev (frontend)

In production run only the backend. It serves the built frontend automatically from wwwroot.