How do I set a default home page in ASP.NET Core 2?

Question

I am having some difficulty configuring a default home page in an ASP.NET MVC Core 2 application. I seem to be unable to get the routing to map to the correct home page a the default when no parameters are used, ex. https://localhost:44362

I don't really like the default convention of putting Controllers in a Controllers folder, view in Views, and View Models in Models. I prefer to group by feature.

So I have a structure like this:

Features
   Home
      HomeController.cs
      HomeIndex.cshtml
      HomeViewModel.cs
   Other
      OtherController.cs
      OtherIndex.cshtml
      OtherViewModel.cs

Everything works fine, except I can't seem to get the default page to be /Home/Index when no path is provided. Everything worked when HomeController was in Controllers (and Index in Views/Home), but as soon as I moved it, things broke.

I'm using the default Startup.cs file, so I have a Configure method that looks like this:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
{
    if (env.IsDevelopment())
    {
        app.UseBrowserLink();
        app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
        app.UseDatabaseErrorPage();
    }
    else
    {
        app.UseExceptionHandler("/Home/Error");
    }

    app.UseStaticFiles();

    app.UseAuthentication();

    app.UseMvc(routes =>
    {
        routes.MapRoute(
            name: "default",
            template: "{controller=Home}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
    });
}

I did some searching it and it looks like using this in the ConfigureServices method should work:

services.AddMvc().AddRazorPagesOptions(options =>
{
    options.Conventions.AddPageRoute("", "/Home/Index");
});

That throws a: Value cannot be null or empty (pageName) exception. I also tried "/", "/Home/Index" as parameters. Finally, just for good measure, I also swapped the above parameters just in case I was misunderstanding usage of each parameter.

In every case, no page is displayed. If I enter the full URL /Home/Index, it works. I also tried to attach a [Route("Home")] attribute to the HomeController class and a [Route("Index")] to the action method.

So I'm obviously messed up the routing, but it's not at all clear to me how to fix this. I've read and re-read the docs on Razor Pages which doesn't seem to clear up my understanding.

Answer 1

@paul-mrozowski, you were almost correct in your solution above. For basic pages you'll have to use the following approach to change the default route, provided you Index page is under /Pages/Home/ directory:

services.AddMvc().AddRazorPagesOptions(options =>
{
    options.Conventions.AddPageRoute("/Home/Index", "");
});

Just in case someone is using Areas, an approach would be similar, provided your Index page is located under /Areas/SomeArea/Pages/ directory:

services.AddMvc().AddRazorPagesOptions(options =>
{
    options.Conventions.AddAreaPageRoute("SomeArea", "/Index", "");
});

Answer 2

It looks like all I needed to do was adjust the locations the Razor view engine looks in my Startup.cs

How to specify the view location

and here in this blog post:

Feature Folder Structure in ASP.NET Core

Then I just needed to remove my Route attributes I had added during testing and it started working.