If you develop REST APIs, then you have probably heard of Swagger before.

Swagger is a tool that automatically documents your Web API, and provides the means to easily interact with it via an auto-generated UI.

In this article, we’ll see how to add Swagger to an ASP .NET Core Web API. We’ll be using the .NET Core 2 SDK, so if you’re using an earlier version, your mileage may vary. We’re only covering basic setup, so check out ASP.NET Web API Help Pages using Swagger in the Microsoft documentation if you want to go beyond that.

Project Setup

To make things easy, we’ll use one of the templates straight out of Visual Studio to get started. Go to File -> New -> Project… and select the ASP .NET Core Web Application template:

Next, pick the Web API template. You may want to change the second dropdown to ASP .NET Core 2.0, as it is currently not set to that by default.

Adding Swagger

You should now have a simple Web API project template with a ValuesController, providing an easy way to play with Web API out of the box.

To add Swagger, we first need to add a package:

Install-Package Swashbuckle.AspNetCore

Then, we throw in some configuration in Startup.cs to make Swagger work. Replace “My API” with whatever your API is called.

        // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
            services.AddMvc();

            services.AddSwaggerGen(c =>
            {
                c.SwaggerDoc("v1", new Info { Title = "My API", Version = "v1" });
            });
        }

        // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
        public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
        {
            if (env.IsDevelopment())
            {
                app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
            }

            app.UseSwagger();

            app.UseSwaggerUI(c =>
            {
                c.SwaggerEndpoint("/swagger/v1/swagger.json", "My API V1");
            });

            app.UseMvc();
        }

Note: if you’re starting with a more minimal project template, it is possible that you may need to install the Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles package for this to work. This package is already present in the project template we’re using above.

Accessing Swagger

Let’s now run the web application. We should see a basic JSON response from the ValuesController:

If we now change the URL to http://localhost:<port>/swagger/, then we get to the Swagger UI:

Here, we can see a list of all our controllers and their actions. We can also open them up to interact with them.

Summary

That’s all it takes to add Swagger to your ASP .NET Core Web API.

1. Add the Swashbuckle.AspNetCore package.
2. Configure Swagger in the startup class.
3. Access Swagger from http://localhost:<port>/swagger/.