Suppressing the startup and shutdown messages in ASP.NET Core

In this post, I show how you can disable the startup message shown in the console when you run an ASP.NET Core application. This extra text can mess up your logs if you're using a collector that reads from the console, so it can be useful to disable in production. A similar approach can be used to disable the startup log messages when you're using the new IHostBuilder in ASP.NET Core 2.1.

This post will be less of a revelation after David Fowler dropped his list of new features in ASP.NET Core 2.1!. If you haven't seen that tweet yet, I recommend you check out this summary post by Scott Hanselman.

ASP.NET Core startup messages

By default, when you startup an ASP.NET Core application, you'll get a message something like the following, indicating the current environment, the content root path, and the URLs Kestrel is listening on:

Using launch settings from C:\repos\andrewlock\blog-examples\suppress-console-messages\Properties\launchSettings.json...
Hosting environment: Development
Content root path: C:\repos\andrewlock\blog-examples\suppress-console-messages
Now listening on: https://localhost:5001
Now listening on: http://localhost:5000
Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.

This message, written by the WebHostBuilder, gives you a handy overview of your app, but it's written directly to the console, not through the ASP.NET Core Logging infrastructure provided by Microsoft.Extensions.Logging and used by the rest of the application.

When you're running in Docker particularly, it's common to write structured logs to the standard output (Console), and have another process read these logs and send them to a central location, using fluentd for example.

Unfortunately, while the startup information written the console can be handy, it's written in an unstructured format. If you're writing logs to the Console in a structured format for fluentd to read, then this extra text can pollute your nicely structured logs.

The example shown above just uses the default ConsoleLoggingProvider rather than a more structured provider, but it highlights the difference between the messages written by the WebHostBuilder and those written by the logging infrastructure.

Luckily, you can choose to disable the startup messages (and the Application is shutting down... shutdown message).

Disabling the startup and shutdown messages in ASP.NET Core

Whether or not the startup messages are shown is controlled by a setting in your WebHostBuilder configuration. This is different to your app configuration, in that it describes the settings of the WebHost itself. This configuration controls things such as the environment name, the application name, and the ContentRoot path.

By default, these values can be set by using ASPNETCORE_ environment variables to control the values. For example, setting the ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT variable to Staging will set the IHostingEnvironment.EnvironmentName to Staging.

The WebHostBuilder loads a whole number of settings from environment variables if they're available. You can use these to control a wide range of WebHost configuration options.

Disabling the messages using an environment variable

You can override lots of the default host configuration values by setting ASPNETCORE_ environment variables. In this case, the variable to set is ASPNETCORE_SUPPRESSSTATUSMESSAGES. If you set this variable to true on your machine, whether globally, or using launchSettings.json, then both the startup and shutdown messages are suppressed:

Annoyingly, the Using launch settings... messages seems to still be shown. However, it's only shown when you use dotnet run. It won't show if you publish your app and use dotnet app.dll.

Disabling the messages using UseSetting

Environment variables aren't the only way to control the WebHostOptions configuration. You can provide your own configuration entirely by passing in a pre-built IConfiguration object for example, as I showed in a previous post using command line arguments.

However, if you only want to change the one setting, then creating a whole new ConfigurationBuilder may seem a bit like overkill. In that case, you could use the UseSetting method on WebHostBuilder.

Under the hood, if you call UseConfiguration() to provide a new IConfiguration object for your WebHostBuilder, you're actually making calls to UseSetting() for each key-value-pair in the provided configuration.

As shown below, you can use the UseSetting() method to set the SuppressStatusMessages value in the WebHost configuration. This will be picked up by the builder when you call Build() and the startup and shutdown messages will be suppressed.

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        CreateWebHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();
    }

    public static IWebHostBuilder CreateWebHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
        WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
            .UseSetting(WebHostDefaults.SuppressStatusMessagesKey, "True") // add this line
            .UseStartup<Startup>();
}

You may notice that I've used a strongly typed property on WebHostDefaults as the key. There are a whole range of other properties you can set directly in this way. You can see the WebHostDefaults class here, and the WebHostOptions class where the values are used here.

There's an even easier way to set this setting however, with the SuppressStatusMessages() extension method on IHostBuilder:

public static IWebHostBuilder CreateWebHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
    WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
        .SuppressStatusMessages(true) //disable the status messages
        .UseStartup<Startup>();

Under the hood, this extension method sets the WebHostDefaults.SuppressStatusMessagesKey setting for you, so it's probably the preferable approach to use!

I had missed this approach originally, I only learned about it from this helpful twitter thread from David Fowler.

Disabling messages for HostBuilder in ASP.NET Core 2.1

ASP.NET Core 2.1 introduces the concept of a generic Host and HostBuilder, analogous to the WebHost and WebHostBuilder typically used to build ASP.NET Core applications. Host is designed to be used to build non-HTTP apps. You could use it to build .NET Core services for example. Steve Gordon has an excellent introduction I suggest looking into if HostBuilder is new to you.

The following program is a very basic example of creating a simple service, registering an IHostedService to run in the background for the duration of the app's lifetime, and adding a logger to write to the console. The PrintTextToConsoleService class refers to the service in Steve's post.

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // CreateWebHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();
        CreateHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();
    }

    public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => 
        new HostBuilder()
            .ConfigureLogging((context, builder) => builder.AddConsole())
            .ConfigureServices(services => services.AddSingleton<IHostedService, PrintTextToConsoleService>());
}

When you run this app, you will get similar startup messages written to the console:

Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.
Hosting environment: Production
Content root path: C:\repos\andrewlock\blog-examples\suppress-console-messages\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1\
info: suppress_console_messages.PrintTextToConsoleService[0]
      Starting
info: suppress_console_messages.PrintTextToConsoleService[0]
      Background work with text: 14/05/2018 11:27:16 +00:00
info: suppress_console_messages.PrintTextToConsoleService[0]
      Background work with text: 14/05/2018 11:27:21 +00:00

Even though the startup messages look very similar, you have to go about suppressing them in a very different way. Instead of setting environment variables, using a custom IConfiguration object, or the UseSetting() method, you must explicitly configure an instance of the ConsoleLifetimeOptions object.

You can configure the ConsoleLifetimeOptions in the ConfigureServices method using the IOptions pattern, in exactly the same way you'd configure your own strongly-typed options classes. That means you can load the values from configuration if you like, but you could also just configure it directly in code:

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
    new HostBuilder()
        .ConfigureLogging((context, builder) => builder.AddConsole())
        .ConfigureServices(services =>
        {
            services.Configure<ConsoleLifetimeOptions>(options =>  // configure the options
                options.SuppressStatusMessages = true);            // in code
            services.AddSingleton<IHostedService, PrintTextToConsoleService>();
        });

With the additional configuration above, when you run your service, you'll no longer get the unstructured text written to the console.

Summary

By default, ASP.NET Core writes environment and configuration information to the console on startup. By setting the supressStartupMessages webhost configuration value to true, you can prevent these messages being output. For the HostBuilder available in ASP.NET Core 2.1, you need to configure the ConsoleLifetimeOptions object to set SuppressStatusMessages = true.