How to serve a static web site in ASP.NET 4.7 without admin privileges?

Question

I have to serve a static website (multiple files) in an application written in .NET Framework 4.7. On the target system, the application cannot have admin privileges, so IIS is not an option.

I understand, that ASP.NET is the part of the framework supporting this, but how do I implement a static web server with it?

I don't even need anything special, like authentication or TLS, because the client will be on the same host.

I know this would be much easier with .NET 7, but this is not an option for me.

You only need admin if you are accessing the IIS resources like the file system. Put any files on a network drive where you can set access to anybody. There is no different between Net 4.7 and Net 7 with privileges. Net 7 you are using a runtime library. When you install an application on anther machine you always have to publish and install the setup.exe file even a IIS. With Net 7 there is a runtime library that gets installed when you publish. The Net/Core libraries have to be the same on build machine and deploy machine, or you need to publish. — jdweng, Apr 08 '23 at 07:50

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '23 at 09:29

You can setup a simple HttpListener to just serve files out of a folder.

Here is a simple proof of concept:

async Task ServeStaticWebSite() {
    var listener = new HttpListener();
    listener.Prefixes.Add("http://localhost:60000/");
    listener.Start();
    const string baseDir = @"C:\tmp"; // where your files are, for example index.html

    while(true)  // keeps running forever, add some mechanism to stop this
    {
        var ctx =  await listener.GetContextAsync();
       
        // sanitize the url, verify no path traversal is possible 
        var fullPath = Path.GetFullPath(Path.Combine(baseDir, "." + ctx.Request.RawUrl.Replace('/', '\\')));
        
        if (File.Exists(fullPath)) {
            using(var fs = File.OpenRead(fullPath))
            {
               ctx.Response.StatusCode = 200;
               fs.CopyTo(ctx.Response.OutputStream);
            }
        } else {
            ctx.Response.StatusCode = 404;
        }
        ctx.Response.OutputStream.Close();
    }
    listener.Stop();
    listener.Close();
}

If you need to handle more connections in parallel extend my example with the solution in this answer on Handling multiple requests with C# HttpListener from user gordy

When the above method runs, you should get a result in your browser when you go to http://localhost:60000/index.html

Thank you, I knew there has to be an easy way. One thing: I have added the line `ctx.Response.ContentType = System.Web.MimeMapping.GetMimeMapping(fullPath);` to the success response, so that the MIME type is set correctly. — Corbie, Apr 11 '23 at 10:49

How to serve a static web site in ASP.NET 4.7 without admin privileges?

1 Answers1