aspire

A guide to Aspire 13.5.x, a .NET and TypeScript toolkit for defining, running, observing, testing, and deploying applications made of multiple services.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create or upgrade an AppHost, connect projects or resources such as Redis and PostgreSQL, add ServiceDefaults and OpenTelemetry, test distributed applications, or deploy them.
Why use it?
It helps developers choose the current Aspire setup and connect services, integrations, service discovery, health checks, and monitoring correctly.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/managedcode/dotnet-skills/aspire
Any agent
npx skills add managedcode/dotnet-skills --skill aspire
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/managedcode/dotnet-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 145 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,041 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00145 $0.03041
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.01520
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00608
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00304

Measured 2d ago against content hash 89292666c6b8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aspire scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

catalog/Frameworks/Aspire/skills/aspire/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Aspire

Trigger On

  • Aspire.AppHost.Sdk, Aspire.Hosting.*, DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder, apphost.mts, createBuilder, WithReference, WaitFor, AddProject, addNodeApp, addViteApp, AddRedis, AddPostgres, aspire run, aspire init, aspire add, or aspire update
  • Aspire.Hosting.Testing, DistributedApplicationTestingBuilder, or a test harness that mixes an Aspire AppHost with WebApplicationFactory
  • orchestrating multiple services and resources with an AppHost for local development or cloud deployment
  • setting up ServiceDefaults, service discovery, OpenTelemetry, health checks, or the Aspire Dashboard
  • choosing between official first-party Aspire integrations and CommunityToolkit/Aspire
  • upgrading older 8.x or 9.x Aspire solutions to the current CLI and AppHost SDK model
  • wiring polyglot services into an Aspire topology, especially when Go, Bun, Java, Python, or extra dev-time tools enter the picture

Workflow

  1. Classify the task first: new AppHost creation, existing-solution enlistment, integration wiring, testing and observability, deployment, or version upgrade.
  2. Prefer the current Aspire toolchain. Choose a C# AppHost for .NET-first repositories or a TypeScript apphost.mts for JavaScript/TypeScript-first repositories; both are first-class in 13.5. Use the Aspire CLI and current SDK-generated app model instead of writing new guidance around the deprecated legacy workload.
  3. Treat 13.5.x releases as the current CLI-first app model. Keep the Aspire CLI, Aspire.AppHost.Sdk, and closely coupled hosting or testing packages on the same line, then rerun the AppHost and deployment checks after aspire update.
  4. Keep the AppHost code-first and topology-focused. Model services, resources, dependencies, endpoints, lifetimes, and parameters there; keep business logic out.
  5. Keep ServiceDefaults narrow. It exists for telemetry, health checks, resilience, and service discovery, not shared domain models or general utility code.
  6. Prefer official first-party Aspire integrations when they cover the requirement. Use CommunityToolkit/Aspire only when the capability gap is real: unsupported language hosts, extra dev infrastructure, or extension packages the official project does not provide.
  7. Validate the whole distributed system, not one project in isolation. Local success means the AppHost starts cleanly, dependencies resolve through WithReference, the dashboard shows the expected resource graph, and end-to-end tests can exercise the topology.
  8. For integration tests, keep one shared AppHost fixture per test session. Use Aspire.Hosting.Testing to boot the distributed app, create HttpClient or SignalR clients from the AppHost, and layer WebApplicationFactory on top only when tests need direct Host DI, grains, or runtime services.
  9. When publishing, switch from local containers or emulators to managed resources deliberately and verify which services truly need external endpoints.

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 122 lines · 145 tokens per session scan A 89292666c6b8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aspire is a skill published in the GitHub repository managedcode/dotnet-skills (477 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 3,041 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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