In this earlier post I wrote about how you might set-up hangfire in .Net 6 using Lite Storage.

In this post, we’ll talk about the Hangfire dashboard, and specifically, some challenges that may arise when trying to run that inside a container.

I won’t go into the container specifically, although if you’re interested in how the container might be set-up then see this beginner’s guide to Docker.

Let’s quickly look at the Docker Compose file, though:

services:
  my-api:
    build: .\MyApi
    ports: 
      - "5010:80"      
    logging: 
      driver: "json-file"

Here you can see that my-api maps port 5010 to port 80.

Hangfire

Let’s see how we would set-up the Hangfire Dashboard:

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddEndpointsApiExplorer();
builder.Services.AddSwaggerGen();
builder.Services.AddHttpClient();
builder.Services.AddLogging();

builder.Services.AddHangfire(configuration =>
{
    configuration.UseLiteDbStorage("./hf.db");
    
});
builder.Services.AddHangfireServer();

// Add services here

var app = builder.Build();

// Configure the HTTP request pipeline.
if (app.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
    app.UseSwagger();
    app.UseSwaggerUI();
}

app.UseHttpsRedirection();

var options = new DashboardOptions()
{
    Authorization = new[] { new MyAuthorizationFilter() }
};
app.UseHangfireDashboard("/hangfire", options);

app.MapPost(" . . .

app.Run();

public class MyAuthorizationFilter : IDashboardAuthorizationFilter
{
    public bool Authorize(DashboardContext context) => true;
}

This is the set-up, but there’s a few bits to unpack here.

UseHangfireDashboard

The UseHangfireDashboard basically let’s hangifre know that you want the dashboard setting up. However, by default, it will only allow local connections; which does not include mapped connections via Docker.

DashboardOptions.Authorization

The Authorization property allows you to specify who can view the dashboard. As you can see here, I’ve passed in a custom filter that bypasses all security – probably don’t do this in production – but you can substitute the MyAuthorizationFilter for any implementation you see fit.

Note that if you don’t override this, then attempting to access the dashboard will return a 401 error if you’re running the dashboard from inside a container.

Accessing the Dashboard

Navigating to localhost:5010 on the host will take you here: