Aspire.Hosting.Azure.AIFoundry

Aspire.Hosting.Azure.AIFoundry library

Provides extension methods and resource definitions for an Aspire AppHost to configure Azure AI Foundry.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Azure subscription - create one for free

Install the package

In your AppHost project, install the Aspire Azure AI Foundry Hosting library with NuGet:

dotnet add package Aspire.Hosting.Azure.AIFoundry

Configure Azure Provisioning for local development

Adding Azure resources to the Aspire application model will automatically enable development-time provisioning for Azure resources so that you don't need to configure them manually. Provisioning requires a number of settings to be available via .NET configuration. Set these values in user secrets in order to allow resources to be configured automatically.

{
    "Azure": {
      "SubscriptionId": "<your subscription id>",
      "ResourceGroupPrefix": "<prefix for the resource group>",
      "Location": "<azure location>"
    }
}

Usage example

Then, in the AppHost.cs file of AppHost, add an Azure AI Foundry deployment and consume the connection using the following methods:

var chat = builder.AddAzureAIFoundry("foundry")
                  .AddDeployment("chat", "Phi-4", "1", "Microsoft");

var myService = builder.AddProject<Projects.MyService>()
                       .WithReference(chat).WaitFor(chat);

The WithReference method passes that connection information into a connection string named chat in the MyService project.

In the Program.cs file of MyService, the connection can be consumed using a client library like Aspire.Azure.AI.Inference or Aspire.OpenAI if the model is compatible with the OpenAI API:

Note: The format parameter of the AddDeployment() method can be found in the Azure AI Foundry portal in the details page of the model, right after the Quick facts text.

Inference client usage

builder.AddAzureChatCompletionsClient("chat")
       .AddChatClient();

OpenAI client usage

builder.AddOpenAIClient("chat")
       .AddChatClient();

Emulator usage

Aspire supports the usage of the Foundry Local. Add the following to your AppHost project:

// AppHost
var chat = builder.AddAzureAIFoundry("foundry")
                  .RunAsFoundryLocal()
                  .AddDeployment("chat", "phi-3.5-mini", "1", "Microsoft");

When the AppHost starts up the local foundry service also be started.

This requires the local machine to have the Foundry Local installed and running.

Connection Properties

When you reference Azure AI Foundry resources using WithReference, the following connection properties are made available to the consuming project:

Azure AI Foundry resource

The Azure AI Foundry resource exposes the following connection properties:

Azure AI Foundry deployment

The Azure AI Foundry deployment resource inherits all properties from its parent Azure AI Foundry resource and adds:

Note: The property named ModelName refers to the deployment name when targeting Azure AI Foundry, but to the model identifier when running Foundry Local.

Aspire exposes each property as an environment variable named [RESOURCE]_[PROPERTY]. For instance, the Uri property of a resource called chat becomes CHAT_URI.

Additional documentation

• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-foundry/what-is-azure-ai-foundry
• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-foundry/foundry-local/
• https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/tree/main/src/Components/README.md

Feedback & contributing

https://github.com/dotnet/aspire