This Git repo demonstrates procedure and Dockerfiles to build an .NET Core application running on IOx framework coming with Cisco 829 / 809 Industrial Integrated Services Routers.

Building process consists of following steps.

1. Build .NET Core Hello World binaries using Microsoft provided Docker image.
2. Extract the built executable from the image.
3. Build Docker image for runtime.
4. Convert the runtime image to IOx application package.

Before you start, you need to install ioxclient tool from Cisco.

ioxclient is a developer tool used for manipulating IOx environment. It will be used for creating IOx application from a Docker image. You can find ioxclient here.

Consult to Cisco DevNet site for more detail.

Build a .NET Core Hello World binaries using Docker image from Microsoft. The Dockerfile under build directory does it for you. Execute following command.

$ cd build
$ docker build -t dotnet-ir800-build .

You will get a Docker image tagged with "dotnet-ir800-build".

The binaries are built under /hello/bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.0/publish/. You can extract it by executing following command. extract.sh in the directory does it for you.

$ cd ../runtime
$ docker run --rm -ti --volume "`pwd`:/vol" dotnet-ir800-build /bin/sh /copy.sh

You will get a DLL file, PDB file and two JSON files on your working directory. Those must be hello.deps.json, hello.dll, hello.pdb and hello.runtimeconfig.json.

Make sure you already have four built files under runtime directory.

The Dockerfile under the runtime directory builds a Docker image which contains Hello World application binaries, .NET Core runtime and all libraries the runtime depends on.

To get the image, execute following command under runtime directory.

$ docker build -t dotnet-ir800 .

You will get a Docker image tagged with "dotnet-ir800". The image contains Hello World app and a shell script for keeping container running.

Once a Docker image for runtime has been built, you can convert it to IOx application package.

Navigate to the directory app and execute following command.

$ cd ../app
$ ioxclient docker package dotnet-ir800 .

You will get packaget.tar which is IOx application package installable to IR809 or IR829.

Install the IOx app to IR8x9, activate then start.

When the app is started, loop.sh is called. This sample app doesn't start .NET Hello World because it cannot keep the app container running. Like Docker container, IOx app container stops when its first process terminated. If we started Hello World as the first app process, it shows Hello World message then immediately finishes. As a result of this, the entire app container stops immediately so we cannot verify if the Hello World is really working.

So we starts a small dummy process which only keeps running so that we can keep the app container running until we stop it intentionally. The loop.sh does this.

While IOx app is running, we can access to console of the container using ioxclient tool with following command.

NOTE: Before you access to the app console, make sure your ioxclient has correct profile created for your IR8x9. Use ioxclient profile create command to create new profile. Use port number 22 for SSH instead of default 2222.

$ ioxclient application console <app-ID>

Once you get shell prompt inside of the app container, run dotnet command to execute the Hello World.

# dotnet /hello/hello.dll
Hello World!

You will see "Hello World!" on the console.