in asp.net 5 is it possible to store and read custom files in approot instead of wwwroot?

Question

when you deploy an asp.net5/mvc6 app there is the wwwroot folder where web assets like css, js, images belong, and there is approot folder where packages and source code belong.

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible. Just get the path to your app folder and the pass it to configuration or whoever else needs it:

public class Startup
{
    public Startup(IHostingEnvironment env, IApplicationEnvironment appEnv)
    {
        var wwwrootRoot = env.WebRootPath;
        var appRoot = appEnv.ApplicationBasePath;

Answer 2

The accepted answer is correct, but since a ASP.NET Core 1.0 release a few things have changed so I thought I'd write a new clear things up a bit.

What I did was create a folder in my project called AppData. You can call it anything you like.

Note: it's not in wwwroot because we want to keep this data private.

Next, you can use IHostingEnvironment to get access to the folder path. This interface can be injected as a dependency into some kind of helper service and what you end up with is something like this:

public class AppDataHelper
{
    private readonly IHostingEnvironment _hostingEnvironment;
    private const string _appDataFolder = "AppData";

    public AppDataHelper(IHostingEnvironment hostingEnvironment)
    {
        _hostingEnvironment = hostingEnvironment;
    }

    public async Task<string> ReadAllTextAsync(string relativePath)
    {
        var path = Path.Combine(_hostingEnvironment.ContentRootPath, _appDataFolder, relativePath);

        using (var reader = File.OpenText(path))
        {
            return await reader.ReadToEndAsync();
        }
    }
}

Additionally, to get things to deploy correctly I had to add the AppData folder to the publishOptions include list in project.json.

As mentioned in the comments, to deploy AppData folder correctly in ASP.NET MVC Core 2 (using *.csproj file, instead of project.json), syntax is as follows:

  <ItemGroup>
    <None Include="AppData\*" CopyToPublishDirectory="PreserveNewest" />
  </ItemGroup>