What? Other than it being totally AWESOME?!

Nancy is a framework for creating web applications. It makes sure to implement the super-duper-happy-path, which means it requires very little effort to get a website up and running.

Here I will give a basic overview of how to build a Nancy API.

Why choose Nancy?

The thing I love about using Nancy, is that I can build my web app in Visual Studio in Windows, but I am also able to run it in Linux! Or even run it in a Docker container. I am looking forward to Visual Studio being available for OSX, where everything should still work! 🙂

It is also really easy to use. There are so many Nuget packages out there that can add additional functionality to your Nancy app.

How is a Nancy API project structured?

A Nancy web application (in a nutshell) is a collection of modules. These modules define the routes for your application, and contain all the code you want to execute.

I commonly use Owin to host my Nancy app, which needs to Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb and create a Startup class to initialize the application.

The folders

Models

This contains the models you want to return from the API

Modules

Modules are the guts of the application. These modules contain the routes for your app

The files

Bootstrapper.cs

• Manually register dependencies
• Add additional features to you Nancy app

Startup.cs

• Add Nancy to the Owin pipeline

The Startup class

A simple Nancy module

Next steps

What I have just talked about is very basic, but it is definitely enough to get you started. In my next posts I will show you how to build a simple todo application using Nancy (seems to be the standard tutorial app). This will include how to do testing using the Nancy.Testing package! Then I shall also create a post on how to do continuous integration using GitLab CI 🙂