.NET Worker Services

Overview

.NET Worker Services are long-running background applications built on the Generic Host (Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting). They use BackgroundService or IHostedService to run tasks that operate independently of HTTP requests, such as queue processing, scheduled jobs, file watching, and health monitoring.

Worker services support the same DI, configuration, logging, and lifetime management as ASP.NET Core applications. They can run as console applications, Windows services (via Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices), or Linux systemd daemons (via Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Systemd).

Create a new worker service:

dotnet new worker -n MyWorker

Install platform-specific hosting packages:

dotnet add package Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices
dotnet add package Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Systemd