My Nancy root path hacks for debugging views quickly when self-hosting

readme.md

Editing Nancy ViewEngine code directly when self-hosting

Here's how i allow myself to directly edit my view code in my Visual Studio project and then see those edits when i refresh the browser.

i use two tricks:

1. Output the path to my working directory to a file (in the output path) from a post-build script
2. Pick up that file and set my RootPath to its contents

Works on my machine :)

Build script

echo "$(ProjectDir)Web" > "$(OutDir)Debug-Path.txt"

MyRootPathProvider.cs

// Works as of Nancy 0.17.1 i think
using System.IO;

public class MyRootPathProvider : Nancy.IRootPathProvider
{
    public string GetRootPath()
    {
#if DEBUG
        // Use the project directory in `DEBUG` mode so i can edit my resources in VS instead of some other gymnastics
        string debugHintFilePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "Debug-Root-Path.txt");
        if (File.Exists(debugHintFilePath))
        {
            String debugRootPath = File.ReadAllText(debugHintFilePath).Replace("\"", "").Trim();
            if (Directory.Exists(debugRootPath))
            {
                return debugRootPath;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            throw new Exception("Your root path has not been set correctly. Please make sure you have permissions to write to this project's output path. You can also check the post-build event to make sure it's working correctly.");
        }
#endif
        return Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "Web");
    }
}

Thanks this helps me alot. Just check your build task is not 100%. It writes to Debug-Path.txt but looks for the file Debug-Root-Path.txt