How to Dependency Inject a Service from Startup back in Program

Full source code here.

While writing some recent blog posts on HttpClientFactory I had to work with some of the obscure features of ServiceCollection and dependency injection in .NET Core 2.1. One of the things I wanted to do was get at an instance of a token generator from the service collection inside the Main method in Program.cs.

Some time ago I wrote a post about using the ServiceCollection from Program.cs and while that worked for the example I gave, there are cases where it would not depending on the specifics of what scope you are using, and in the case of a singleton, how you instanced it. When it goes wrong you end up with multiple instances of a singleton, multiple DI containers and plenty of unpredictable results. It’s too painful to explain all the variations, you can read a bit more here where David Folwer says “hosting current[ly] creates 3 service providers and its extremely broken in the general case”.

How to Pass a Service from ServicesCollection into Program
In this approach none there are none of the problems outlined above, only one instance of the singleton is every instantiated.

In Startup.cs add all the services you want inside ConfigureServices(..).

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMemoryCache();
    services.AddSingleton<ITokenGenerator, TokenGenerator>();
}

In Program.cs, I have the usual CreateWebHostBuilder(..), no changes.

public static IWebHostBuilder CreateWebHostBuilder(string[] args) =>
    WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)	
        .UseStartup<Startup>();	

But in Main, instead of

CreateWebHostBuilder(args).Build().Run();

I split building the WebHost from running the WebHost.

public static void Main(string[] args)
{		
    IWebHost webHost = CreateWebHostBuilder(args).Build();
    var tokenGenerator = webHost.Services.GetService<ITokenGenerator>();
    string token =  tokenGenerator.GetToken();
    System.Console.WriteLine(token);
    webHost.Run();
}

• Line 3 creates the webHost, but doesn’t run it
this in turn instantiates the startup class and runs ConfigureServices(..)
• Line 4 reaches into the ServiceCollection for the ITokenGenerator service that was setup in ConfigureServices(..)
• Lines 5 and 6, use the TokenGenerator service to get a token a print it to screen
• Line 7 runs the WebHost and the application starts up

Full source code here.