Kestrel hosting basics

Question

I am in the process of developing an ASP.NET website, and I'm very intrigued by using vNext to host my website regardless of host. When I start looking for some of the basic hosting features though, I seem to think that they might not get developed. Does anyone know if the following features are going to be supported with vNext hosting with Kestrel on all platforms:

1. SSL hosting
2. Logging of HTTP requests (like IIS)
3. IIS modules (I'm guessing not, I only need url rewrite to redirect to HTTPS)

Answer 1

As stated on the KestrelHttpServer repo:

This repo contains a development web server for ASP.NET vNext based on libuv.

Because it is currently slated as a development server, some features might never make their way in. For example, IIS has features for controlling IP address mapping to hostnames, limitations on bandwidth/memory/CPU, etc. A development server generally wouldn't have such features.

As to IIS modules, I can comfortably say that it definitely won't support them because they are IIS-specific, and Kestrel has nothing to do with IIS.

Regarding SSL hosting, that's certainly an interesting possibility, but it's not currently in the plans. That would certainly seem useful even for a development web server (IIS Express supports it).

Update: The repo documentation has been updated as of Sept 1 so it now reads:

This repo contains a web server for ASP.NET Core based on libuv.

Answer 2

You can run kestrel behind nginx server. It will give you SSL, virtual host and other functionality. But kestrel still really unstable, so you should think twice before using it in production. Here is an article with instruction how to configure nginx to pass requests to the kestrel