backend

Flotilla backend

The backend of Flotilla is an ASP.NET application. See the .NET documentation for framework concepts.

For development conventions and gotchas, see best_practices.md.

Prerequisites

• .NET SDK 10.x

• dotnet-ef, if you need to work with migrations:

  dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef

Configuration

The backend reads environment variables from backend/api/.env. Create it by running setup.sh from the repository root, or by copying the template manually:

cp api/.env.example api/.env

Set Local__DevUserId to your own user id for local development.

Run

Common commands are defined in the Makefile:

make run       # dotnet run --project api
make build     # dotnet build api
make test      # dotnet test
make format    # dotnet csharpier format .

Swagger is served at http://localhost:8000/swagger.

To run the backend in Docker together with the rest of the stack, see the root README.

Connecting to the development database

By default the backend runs against an in-memory database. To use the development database instead, add the following to backend/api/.env:

Database__UseInMemoryDatabase=false
Database__PostgreSqlConnectionString=...

The connection string is found in the key vault in the development resource group in Azure. Remember to add your IP address to the accepted IPs for connecting to the database.

Database migrations (EF Core)

The database model lives in api/Database/Models and we use Entity Framework Core as an O/RM. When changing the model, add a migration.

Create a new migration (make sure you have the latest main and that no one else is adding a migration at the same time):

make migration name=AddTableNamePropertyName

This adds files under backend/api/Migrations that must be committed. Adding a migration does not modify any database — it only describes the changes.

To discard a migration you're not happy with:

dotnet ef migrations remove

Applying migrations

• Development: after merging a PR that touches backend/api/Migrations, manually run the "Run database migrations (Development)" workflow.
• Staging / Production: applied automatically by the deploy_to_staging and promote_to_production workflows.

Monitoring

The backend is instrumented with OpenTelemetry. Traces, metrics, and logs are exported via OTLP to a Grafana-compatible backend.

Locally, telemetry can be inspected in the Aspire dashboard at http://localhost:18888. It is started as part of make compose, or on its own together with the broker and the OpenTelemetry collector:

make broker-aspire