What are the differences between Launch URL and App URL?

Question

What is the difference between App URL and Launch URL from ASP.NET Core?

With these settings, I can access my app, both over HTTP on port 4099 and over HTTPS on port 44363, but first it launches on HTTPS. I'm using VS 2017. If I use the same URL for App and Launch I get:

An error occurred attempting to determine the process id of dotnet.exe which is hosting your application. One or more errors occurred.

If I remove Launch URL and keep App URL with HTTPS I get the same error.

What is the difference between them and how do I redirect every HTTP request to HTTPS? Microsoft is not helping right now: link to microsoft docs

Answer 1

As far as i can tell:

• Launch Url is the url you host your dotnet core application on and to which port the kestrel server is listening.
• Websettings, AppUrl is the url IIS is listening to. IIS (which is basically a reverse proxy here) will forward all the http request comming from the AppUrl to the Launch URL.

If you remove the Launch URL kestrel has no port to listen to, and will throw an error on startup, or fallback to port 5000.