Tutorial: Get started with Razor Pages in ASP.NET Core

12/5/2018
3 minutes to read
Contributors

By Rick Anderson

This is the first tutorial of a series. The series teaches the basics of building an ASP.NET Core Razor Pages web app.

For a more advanced introduction aimed at experienced developers, see Introduction to Razor Pages.

At the end of the series you'll have an app that manages a database of movies.

View or download sample code (how to download).

In this tutorial, you:

Create a Razor Pages web app.
Run the app.
Examine the project files.

At the end of this tutorial you'll have a working Razor Pages web app that you'll build on in later tutorials.

Home or Index page

Prerequisites

Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 or later with the ASP.NET and web development workload
.NET Core SDK 2.2 or later

Create a Razor Pages web app

From the Visual Studio File menu, select New > Project.
Create a new ASP.NET Core Web Application. Name the project RazorPagesMovie. It's important to name the project RazorPagesMovie so the namespaces will match when you copy and paste code.
Select ASP.NET Core 2.2 in the dropdown, and then select Web Application.

The following starter project is created:

Open the integrated terminal.
Change directories (cd) to a folder which will contain the project.
Run the following commands:
```
dotnet new webapp -o RazorPagesMovie
code -r RazorPagesMovie
```
- The dotnet new command creates a new Razor Pages project in the RazorPagesMovie folder.
- The code command opens the RazorPagesMovie folder in a new instance of Visual Studio Code.
A dialog box appears with Required assets to build and debug are missing from 'RazorPagesMovie'. Add them?
Select Yes

From a terminal, run the following commands:

dotnet new webapp -o RazorPagesMovie
cd RazorPagesMovie

The preceding commands use the .NET Core CLI to create a Razor Pages project.

Open the project

From Visual Studio, select File > Open, and then select the RazorPagesMovie.csproj file.

Run the web app

Press Ctrl+F5 to run without the debugger.

Visual Studio starts IIS Express and runs the app. The address bar shows localhost:port# and not something like example.com. That's because localhost is the standard hostname for the local computer. Localhost only serves web requests from the local computer. When Visual Studio creates a web project, a random port is used for the web server. In the preceding image, the port number is 5001. When you run the app, you'll see a different port number.

On the app's home page, select Accept to consent to tracking.

This app doesn't track personal information, but the project template includes the consent feature in case you need it to comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The following image shows the app after you give consent to tracking:

Examine the project files

Here's an overview of the main project folders and files that you'll work with in later tutorials.

Pages folder

Contains Razor pages and supporting files. Each Razor page is a pair of files:

A .cshtml file that contains HTML markup with C# code using Razor syntax.
A .cshtml.cs file that contains C# code that handles page events.

Supporting files have names that begin with an underscore. For example, the _Layout.cshtml file configures UI elements common to all pages. This file sets up the navigation menu at the top of the page and the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. For more information, see Layout in ASP.NET Core.

wwwroot folder

Contains static files, such as HTML files, JavaScript files, and CSS files. For more information, see Static files in ASP.NET Core.

appSettings.json

Contains configuration data, such as connection strings. For more information, see Configuration in ASP.NET Core.

Program.cs

Contains the entry point for the program. For more information, see ASP.NET Core Web Host.

Startup.cs

Contains code that configures app behavior, such as whether it requires consent for cookies. For more information, see App startup in ASP.NET Core.

Next steps