How does a minimal C# Web REST API work?

REST APIs are an essential part of any web dev toolbox: they are a primary component of modern websites and make it easy to link the frontend to the backend, or to share some data with other external clients.

Because they are such a fundamental part of today’s web ecosystem, lots of programming languages allow us to create REST APIs easily — and, of course, C# is no exception!

So, in this article, we’re going to go through the default Web REST API the .NET tool generates for us step by step to understand how to get started writing our own APIs in C#.

Are you ready? Then let’s go! :)

Setting up our project

So, to begin with, let’s create a new C# .NET project for our REST API. To get the right coding environment, the easiest is to start from the webapi project template. We can even pass it the -minimal option to use the ASP.NET Core Minimal API:

(Where api-example is the name of my C# project: feel free to adapt it to your liking!)