ASP.Net Core application service only listening to Port 5000 on Ubuntu

Question

I am trying to host an ASP.Net Core MVC application (https redirection is enabled) on Ubuntu server, using Nginx as a reverse proxy. I have created and installed a local SSL certificate using OpenSSL. When i run my application using dotnet CLI it listens on both http://localhost:5000 & https://localhost:5001 , and i am able to access it on web using https (http requests are being redirect to https by Nginx).

The problem is when i try to run the as a service, it only listens on http://localhost:5000 .

Here's the *.service file :

[Unit]
Description=Test ASP.Net core web application service.

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/MyAppFolder
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dotnet/home/ubuntu/MyAppFolder/MyApplication.dll
Restart=always
# Restart service after 10 seconds if the dotnet service crashes:
RestartSec=10
SyslogIdentifier=MyApplication
User=www-data
Environment=ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Development
Environment=DOTNET_PRINT_TELEMETRY_MESSAGE=false
Environment=ASPNETCORE_HTTPS_PORT=5001
Environment=ASPNETCORE_URLS=http://localhost:5000;https://localhost:5001

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Environment details : ASP.Net Core 2.1.1, ASP.Net Core SDK 2.1.3, Nginx 1.14, Ubuntu 16.04

Answer 1

Finally i figured out the issue. The issue is that a developer ssl certificate is installed with dotnet SDK with the name localhost. In case of Ubuntu the certificate is located at /home/{user name} /.dotnet/corefx/cryptography/x509stores/my

Kestrel just searches in the home directory of executing user, which does not exists for 'www-data', hence it couldn't locate the development certificate. Due to which it doesn't bind to default https port.

To get it working, i first converted my existing certificate in PEM ( .crt) format to PKCS12 ( .pkf) using OpenSSL. Below is the command.

sudo openssl pkcs12 -export -out certificate.pfx -inkey privateKey.key -in certificate.crt -certfile more.crt

Then i needed to specify this certificate to Kestrel server, using appsettings.json file. Below is how the file looks now :

{
  "ConnectionStrings": {
    "PostgresConnection": "Host=localhost; Database=postgres; Username=postgres; Password=xyz123"
  },
  "Logging": {
    "IncludeScopes": false,
    "LogLevel": {
      "Default": "Warning"
    }
  },

  "Kestrel": {
    "Endpoints": {
      "HTTPS": {
        "Url": "https://localhost:5001",
        "Certificate": {
          "Path": "/etc/ssl/certs/<certificate.pfx>",
          "Password": "xyz123"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Then you need to add www-data user to ssl-certs group. below is command line :

sudo usermod -aG ssl-cert www-data