Ocelot is a .NET API Gateway. This project is aimed at people using .NET running a microservices / service-oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP(S) and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports.
In particular we want easy integration with IdentityServer reference and Bearer tokens. We have been unable to find this in our current workplace without having to write our own Javascript middlewares to handle the IdentityServer reference tokens. We would rather use the IdentityServer code that already exists to do this.
Ocelot is a bunch of middlewares in a specific order.
Ocelot manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware, where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.
The middleware that makes the request is the last thing in the Ocelot pipeline. It does not call the next middleware.
The response from the downstream service is retrieved as the requests goes back up the Ocelot pipeline.
There is a piece of middleware that maps the HttpResponseMessage onto the HttpResponse object and that is returned to the client.
That is basically it with a bunch of other features!
A quick list of Ocelot's capabilities, for more information see the Documentation.
- Routing
- Request Aggregation
- GraphQL 1
- Service Discovery 2
- Service Fabric
- Kubernetes
- Websockets
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Rate Limiting
- Caching
- Quality of Service 3
- Load Balancer
- Logging / Tracing / Correlation
- Headers / Method / Query String / Claims Transformation
- Custom Middleware / Delegating Handlers
- Configuration / Administration REST API
- Platform & Cloud Agnostic Building
Ocelot is designed to work with ASP.NET Core and it targets net6.0, net7.0 and net8.0 frameworks. 4
Install Ocelot package and its dependencies using NuGet Package Manager:
Install-Package OcelotOr via the .NET CLI:
dotnet add package OcelotAll versions can be found on nuget.
- Ocelot documentation — Read the Docs
This includes lots of information and will be helpful if you want to understand the features Ocelot currently offers. - Ocelot RST Docs
This includes source code of documentation as .rst files which are up to date for current development.
You can see what we are working on in backlog.
We love to receive contributions from the community, so please keep them coming 
Pull requests, issues and commentary welcome!
Please complete the relevant template for issues and PRs.
Sometimes it's worth getting in touch with us to discuss changes before doing any work in case this is something we are already doing or it might not make sense.
We can also give advice on the easiest way to do things
Finally, we mark all existing issues as 
If you want to contribute for the first time, we suggest looking at a 
Footnotes
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Ocelot doesn’t directly support GraphQL. Developers can easily integrate the GraphQL for .NET library. ↩
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Ocelot does support Consul, Netflix Eureka, Service Fabric service discovery providers, and special modes like Dynamic Routing and Custom Providers. ↩
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Starting with v21.0, the solution's code base supports Multitargeting as SDK-style projects. It should be easier for teams to move between (migrate to) .NET 6, 7 and 8 frameworks. Also, new features will be available for all .NET SDKs which we support via multitargeting. Find out more here: Target frameworks in SDK-style projects ↩