Aspire and Dapr bindings via Aspire.Hosting.Testing

[Tom Boon (tomboon)]

Hello,

I've been stuck on this problem for a while and can't seem to get it to work. I've run out of ideas and AI keeps hallucinating solutions that don't exist.

Context: dotnet 10, dotnet aspire, azurite, dapr 1.16.5, docker desktop. Dapr is installed on my machine via dapr cli.

In my dotnet Aspire Apphost:

// spin up Azurite Azure storage
var blobstorage = builder
    .AddAzureStorage("storage")
    .RunAsEmulator(azurite =>
        azurite
               .WithBlobPort(10000)   
               .WithQueuePort(10001)
               .WithTablePort(10002) 
               .WithDataVolume());

// spin up my app with a dapr sidecar
builder
    .AddProject<Projects.MyApp>("myapp")
    .WithDaprSidecar(new DaprSidecarOptions
    {
        AppId = "myapp",
        ResourcesPaths = [daprComponentsPath], // points to dir with dapr yamls
    });  

I define a dapr Azure BlobStorage binding component via yaml:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: my-blobstorage
spec:
  type: bindings.azure.blobstorage
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: accountName
    value: <azurite account name>
  - name: accountKey
    value: <azurite key>
  - name: containerName
    value: mycontainer
  - name: endpoint
    value: http://127.0.0.1:10000    // hardcoded - not ideal 

What works:
When I spin up dotnet Aspire locally this works fine. Ideally though, I don't want to hardcode the Azurite ports (10000, 10001, 10002). But that brings us to the problem below:

What doesn't work:
Using the Aspire.Hosting.Testing package I spin up my Aspire Apphost for running end-to-end tests using xunit. In this case, the binding doesn't work.

When asking the DaprClient in my app to use the binding, it can't find the azurite storage (host not available, ...).

My guess is that when running Aspire Apphost via testing, it runs more isolated (docker network or something?), and 127.0.0.1 will point to the dapr sidecar's own host instead of to Azurite.

I tried different approaches like

• using a reference to an environment variable in my binding yaml (does not work because passing .WithEnvironment in Aspire sets the variable for MyApp but not for the sidecar)
• waiting for Azurite resource to be ready and overwriting the yaml file (does not work because sidecar will have started by then, and does not hot reload yaml config)
• trying to set dapr components after Aspire fully started via rest api (nice hallucination from AI but does not exist)

TL/DR: how can i set an Azurite endpoint in a dapr yaml config - when Azurite is loaded by Aspire AND that dapr yaml config is also needed by Aspire (for spinning up a dapr sidecar) ?

Any ideas on how to fix this?