GridGain Developers Hub

Application Deployment Options

Overview

GridGain.NET consists of .NET assemblies and Java jar files. The .NET assemblies are referenced by your project and are copied to an output folder during the build automatically. The JAR files should be copied manually. GridGain.NET discovers them via the IgniteHome or JvmClasspath settings.

Full Binary Package Deployment

  • Copy the whole GridGain distribution package along with your application

  • Set the IGNITE_HOME environment variable or IgniteConfiguration.IgniteHome setting to point to that folder

NuGet Deployment

Project properties are updated automatically during the GridGain.NET NuGet package installation to copy jar files to the libs folder in the output directory (see Getting Started). Make sure to include that libs folder when distributing your binaries.

Make sure IGNITE_HOME is not set globally. Normally you don’t need to set IGNITE_HOME with NuGet, except for ASP.NET deployments (see below).

To exclude jar files from the build output, add the <ExcludeAssets>build</ExcludeAssets> property to the corresponding <PackageReference> element in your .csproj file. This can be useful for thin client use cases and custom deployments.

Single File Deployment

GridGain.NET supports single file deployment that is available in .NET Core 3 / .NET 5+.

  • Use the IncludeAllContentForSelfExtract MSBuild property to include jar files into the single-file bundle, or ship them separately.

  • See Troubleshooting: DllNotFoundException for a workaround that is required on .NET 5 with some Ignite versions.

Publish command example:

dotnet publish --self-contained true -r linux-x64 -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeAllContentForSelfExtract=true

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
...

    <ItemGroup>
      <PackageReference Include="GridGain.Ignite" Version="8.8.2">
          <ExcludeAssets>build</ExcludeAssets>
      </PackageReference>
    </ItemGroup>

</Project>

Custom Deployment

The JAR files are located in the libs folder of the binary distribution and NuGet package. The minimum set of jars for GridGain.NET is:

  • ignite-core-{VER}.jar

  • cache-api-1.0.0.jar

  • ignite-indexing folder (if SQL queries are used)

  • ignite-spring folder (if a Spring XML configuration is used)

Deploying JARs to a default location:

  • Copy the JAR files to the libs folder next to Apache.Ignite.Core.dll

  • Do not set the IgniteConfiguration.JvmClasspath, IgniteConfiguration.IgniteHome properties and IGNITE_HOME environment variable

Deploying jar files to an arbitrary location:

  • Copy the JAR files somewhere

  • Set the IgniteConfiguration.JvmClasspath property to a semicolon-separated string of paths for each jar file

  • Do not set the IGNITE_HOME environment variable and IgniteConfiguration.IgniteHome property

c:\ignite-jars\ignite-core-1.5.0.final.jar;c:\ignite-jars\cache-api-1.0.0.jar

ASP.NET Deployment

JvmClasspath or IgniteHome have to be explicitly set when using Ignite in a web environment (IIS and IIS Express), because DDL files are copied to temporary folders, and Ignite can not locate JAR files automatically.

You can set IgniteHome like this in ASP.NET environment:

Ignition.Start(new IgniteConfiguration
{
    IgniteHome = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~\bin\")
});

Alternatively, IGNITE_HOME can be set globally. Add this line at the top of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs:

Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("IGNITE_HOME", HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~\bin\"));

Finally, you can use the following method to populate JvmClasspath:

static string GetDefaultWebClasspath()
{
    var dir = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~\bin\libs");

    return string.Join(";", Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*.jar"));
}

IIS Application Pool Lifecycle, AppDomains, and GridGain.NET

There is a known problem with IIS. When a web application is restarted due to code changes or a manual restart, the application pool process remains alive, while AppDomain gets recycled.

GridGain.NET automatically stops when AppDomain is unloaded. However, a new domain may be started when old one is still unloading. So the node from the old domain can have an IgniteConfiguration.IgniteInstanceName conflict with a node from the new domain.

To fix this issue make sure to either assign a unique IgniteInstanceName, or set IgniteConfiguration.AutoGenerateIgniteInstanceName property to true.

var cfg = new IgniteConfiguration { AutoGenerateIgniteInstanceName = true };
<igniteConfiguration autoGenerateIgniteInstanceName="true">
  ...
</igniteConfiguration>

Refer to the following StackOverflow discussion for more details.