Meet Nancy

Nancy is a lightweight web framework for the .Net platform, inspired by Sinatra. Nancy aims to deliver a low ceremony approach to building light, fast web applications.

Features

Built from the bottom up, not simply a DSL on top of an existing framework. Removing limitations and feature hacks of an underlying framework, as well as the need to reference more assemblies than you need. keep it light
Abstracted away from ASP.NET / IIS so that it can run on multiple hosting environments (planned OWIN support), such as (but not limited to) ASP.NET, WCF, Mono/FastCGI and more (ASP.NET and WCF currently supported out-of-the-box)
Ultra lightweight action declarations for GET, HEAD, PUT, POST and DELETE requests
View engine integration
Powerful request path matching that includes advanced parameter capabilities. The path matching strategy can be replaced with custom implementations to fit your exact needs
Easy response syntax, enabling you to return things like int, string, HttpStatusCode and Action elements without having to explicitly cast or wrap your response - you just return it and Nancy will do the work for you

Usage

Set up your web.config file:

<httpHandlers>
    <add verb="*" type="Nancy.Hosting.NancyHttpRequestHandler" path="*"/>
</httpHandlers>

<system.webServer>
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false"/>
    <handlers>
        <add name="Nancy" verb="*" type="Nancy.Hosting.NancyHttpRequestHandler" path="*"/>
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>

Start adding your Nancy modules containing your actions:

public class Module : NancyModule
{
    public Module()
    {
        Get["/"] = x => {
            return "This is the root";
        };
    }
}

Start your application and enjoy! Swap out Get with either Put, Post or Delete to create actions that will respond to calls using those request methods.

If you want to get fancy you can add parameters to your paths:

public class Module : NancyModule
{
    public Module()
    {
        Get["/greet/{name}"] = x => {
            return string.Concat("Hello ", x.name);
        };
    }
}

The {name} parameter will be captured and injected into the action parameters, shown as x in the sample. The parameters are represented by a dynamic type so you can access any parameter name straight on it as a property or an indexer. For more information on action parameters please refer to the Nancy introduction post over at my blog on [ElegantCode](http://elegantcode.com "Visit ElegantCode).

Nancy also supports the idea of module paths, where you assign a root path for all actions in the module and they will all be relative to that:

public class Module : NancyModule
{
    public Module() : base("/butler")
    {
        Get["/greet/{name}"] = x => {
            return string.Concat("Hello ", x.name);
        };
    }
}

Notice the base("/butler") call to the NancyModule constructor. Now all action paths that are defined in the module will be relative to /butler so in order to greet someone you could access /butler/greet/{name}, for example /butler/greet/thecodejunkie

Bootstrappers

The bootstrapper projects for third party IoC containers are only temporarily in the source code. These will be removed when the IoC integration design has been proven stable. They will be moving into a contrib-style project and/or the Nancy wiki. The reason they won't ship with Nancy is because we do not want to be tasked each time there is a new version of the containers released.

Community

You can find lot of Nancy users on the Nancy User Group. That is where most of the discussions regarding the development and usage of Nancy is taking place. You can also find Nancy on Twitter using the #NancyFx hashtag.

Help out

There are many ways you can contribute to Nancy. Like most open-source software projects, contributing code is just one of many outlets where you can help improve. Some of the things that you could help out with in Nancy are:

Documentation (both code and features)
Bug reports
Bug fixes
Feature requests
Feature implementations
Test coverage
Code quality
Sample applications

View Engines

There is a rich set of view engines in the .net space and most of them have been design in such a away that they are framework agnostic, all that is needed is a bit of integration work to get it running in Nancy. Currently there are support for Razor, Spark, NDjango and a static file engine. There used to be an NHaml engine but it was removed since the view engine project appears to have come to a dead halt. Let us know if that change! WebForms engine.. well let's just say that if you have a need to use WebForms with Nancy then we accept patches!

All view engine integrations are still very early implementations and more work will be put towards them to bring as many of the features, as possible, into Nancy! If you have any experience with either of the engines, grab a fork and start coding!

Contributors

Nancy is not a one man project and many of the features that are availble would not have been possible without the awesome contributions from the community!

Copyright

License

Nancy is licensed under MIT. Refer to license.txt for more information.

gbanister/Nancy