Building a simple reverse proxy with .NET Aspire and YARP

With .NET Aspire, you can spin up distributed applications and infrastructure components with almost no boilerplate.
Here’s a minimal example that uses YARP (Yet Another Reverse Proxy) to serve a static frontend:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.AddYarp("frontend")
    .WithStaticFiles("./web");

builder. Build().Run();

That’s all it takes to host a frontend inside an Aspire-managed app!

Let’s unpack what happens:

• DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args) initializes the Aspire app host — the entry point for defining all components (APIs, databases, frontends, etc.).
• AddYarp("frontend") registers a YARP reverse proxy named frontend. Aspire automatically wires up service discovery and local routing between modules.
• WithStaticFiles("./web") tells YARP to serve static content directly from the web folder — perfect for a Blazor WASM, React, or Vue frontend build output.
• Finally, builder.Build().Run() starts everything — you can open the dashboard or browse directly to the proxy endpoint.

This small snippet demonstrates one of the nicest aspects of Aspire: you can go from idea to running distributed app infrastructure in a few lines of code.
It’s clean, declarative, and plays well with modern cloud-native patterns — all from inside your .NET solution.

[Source code]

That’s all folks!

Cheers!
Gašper Rupnik

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