Welcome to NATS .NET

NATS .NET is an open source NATS client library for modern .NET. NATS .NET fully supports async programming, recent APIs like Span, IAsyncEnumerable, Channels and takes advantage of .NET's performance improvements while providing a pleasant developer experience.

NATS is a lightweight and high-performance messaging system designed for asynchronous communication among different software components, with modern clustering, security and persistence streaming support out of the box, in a single compact binary with no dependencies, available for any modern platform, enabling a vast variety of deployment options from edge, IoT, Kubernetes to bare-metal.

NATS .NET brings the power of NATS to the .NET platform, enabling developers to build distributed, cloud native, modern applications using the tools and languages they already know and love.

Note

Don't confuse NuGet packages! NATS .NET package on NuGet is called NATS.Net. There is another package called NATS.Client which is the older version of the client library and will be deprecated eventually.

Tip

NATS .NET now supports .NET Standard 2.0 and 2.1 along with .NET 6.0 and 8.0, which means you can also use it with .NET Framework 4.6.2+ and Unity 2018.1+.

Hello, World!

NATS team maintains a demo server you can reach at demo.nats.io globally. You can use this server to quickly write your first NATS .NET application without setting up a server.

Note

If you're behind a firewall, you might not be able to reach the demo server. Check out the introduction page for instructions on how to run your own server easily.

Create two console applications, one for subscribing and one for publishing messages.

The Receiver

mkdir HelloNats.Receiver
cd HelloNats.Receiver
dotnet new console
dotnet add package NATS.Net

await using var nc = new NatsClient("demo.nats.io");

Console.Write("Enter your room: ");
var room = Console.ReadLine();

Console.WriteLine($"Listening for messages on 'hello.{room}.>'");

await foreach (var msg in nc.SubscribeAsync<string>(subject: $"hello.{room}.>"))
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Received: {msg.Subject}: {msg.Data}");
}

dotnet run

The Sender

mkdir HelloNats.Sender
cd HelloNats.Sender
dotnet new console
dotnet add package NATS.Net

await using var nc = new NatsClient("demo.nats.io");

Console.Write("Enter your room: ");
var room = Console.ReadLine();

Console.Write("Enter your name: ");
var name = Console.ReadLine();

while (true)
{
    Console.Write("Enter a message to publish: ");
    var message = Console.ReadLine();
    await nc.PublishAsync(subject: $"hello.{room}.{name}", data: message);
}

dotnet run

Try running the sender from more than one terminal to have some fun. Happy chatting!

The receiver will listen to messages on the hello.my_room.> subject and your sender application will send messages to the matching subjects. This subject has a wildcard > at the end, which means it will match any subject starting with hello.my_room..

What's Next

Documentation can help you start creating your application in no time. Follow our quick start guides.

API is the generated reference documentation.

Edit this page