aspire publish with parameters

[Omar Aloraini (ooraini)]

I'm not sure if this is supposed to work, but no luck from my side and it feels like a missed opportunity. I really like appsettings.json and appsettings.Production.json for my aspire parameters and intuitively I thought aspire publish will pick them up given that it specifically applies the Production environment, but it didn't.

apphost.cs:

#:package Aspire.Hosting.Kubernetes@13.4.6-preview.1.26319.6
#:sdk Aspire.AppHost.Sdk@13.4.6+87fe259e4fc244c599019a7b1304c85a1488f248

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var k8s = builder.AddKubernetesEnvironment("k8s");

// The aspireify skill will wire up your projects here.
var flagA = builder.AddParameter("flagA");
var flagB = builder.AddParameter("flagB", "d2", secret: true);

builder.AddProject("flagapi", "FlagApi/FlagApi.csproj")
    .WithEnvironment("flagA", flagA)
    .WithEnvironment("flagB", flagB);

builder.Build().Run();

appsettings.json:

{
  "Parameters": {
    "flagA": "appsettings"
  }
}

The resulting values.yaml:

parameters:
  flagapi:
    port_http: 8080
    flagapi_image: "flagapi:latest"
secrets:
  flagapi:
    flagB: ""
config:
  flagapi:
    OTEL_DOTNET_EXPERIMENTAL_OTLP_RETRY: "in_memory"
    ASPNETCORE_FORWARDEDHEADERS_ENABLED: "true"
    HTTP_PORTS: ""
    flagA: ""
    OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: "http://k8s-dashboard-service:18889"
    OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL: "grpc"
    OTEL_SERVICE_NAME: "flagapi"

It totally makes sense that secrets are skipped, but for non-secret parameters it would be very convenient to wire them to the manifests. This is non-obtrusive since you can always override the values with helm.

[Omar Aloraini (ooraini)]

Using builder.Configuration works:

..
  .WithEnvironment("flagC", Config("StaticHosting:OriginBucket"));
..

string Config(string key) =>
    builder.Configuration[key] ?? throw new InvalidOperationException($"Missing AppHost configuration value '{key}'.");

This works for run and publish with the expected environment layering.