OwinHost 4.2.2

OwinHost Readme: OwinHost enables self-hosting of OWIN applications without requiring the developer to write that host process. The OwinHost package contains the OwinHost.exe host process as well as assemblies containing default loader logic.

OwinHost.exe: When installing the OwinHost package from within Visual Studio, OwinHost.exe can be found in the package's 'tools' directory. In a typical NuGet configuration, this will be located at <solution root>/packages/OwinHost.(version)/tools. While this package installation approach enables use of the Visual Studio Package Manager dialog, the placement of OwinHost.exe relative to the project directory can prove cumbersome over time if regularly run from the command line. In this case, the package can also be installed to a common location on the development machine (using NuGet.exe) and that location's directory can be added to the PATH environment variable. This approach enables OwinHost.exe to be run from the project directory without any path qualifiers. Some third party tools, such as Chocolatey automate this process by setting up a central location for binaries and adding that location to the PATH.

Launching OwinHost: Self-hosting an OWIN application with OwinHost is as simple as running OwinHost.exe from your Web application's project directory. Project directory is defined here as the parent directory of ./bin which contains the application's assemblies as well as the selected server assembly. By default, when running OwinHost.exe with no additional parameters, the host will attempt to locate and load the application's startup class and the OWIN HttpListener server. After constructing the OWIN pipeline with the help of the startup class, it will then begin listening on port 5000. All of these default behaviors can be easily changed using parameters to OwinHost.exe, as described below.

Launching OwinHost from Within Visual Studio 2013: In Visual Studio 2013, OwinHost can be launched directly from within the IDE using the F5 gesture. This is accomplished by a new feature wherein Visual Studio can run custom Web servers that have been registered in a Web application project. For Visual Studio 2013 Web application projects, the OwinHost NuGet package will automatically register OwinHost.exe as a custom Web server. To use it, navigate to the Web tab of project properties and select OwinHost from the dropdown list of available Web servers. Additional command line settings can optionally be specified using the form fields underneath the server list. After setting OwinHost as the Web server, the project can be run using OwinHost.exe by pressing F5.

OwinHost Parameters: There are a variety of ways to customize the default behavior of OwinHost. For example, to select an alternate OWIN-compatible server, run the following:

OwinHost.exe -s <Custom.Server.Assembly>

The full list of options can be seen by running:

OwinHost.exe /?