How to get an instance of IServiceProvider in .NET Core?

To get access to existing DI of ASP.NET Core application e.g. in some controller, you should just resolve it in a constructor. Example with some manager and workers:

public IServiceProvider ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
   services.AddMvc();

   services.AddSingleton<IFooManager, FooManager>();
   services.AddTransient<IFooWorker, FooWorker>();
}

Manually resolve workers for manager:

public class FooManager: IFooManager
{
    private readonly IServiceProvider _serviceProvider;

    public FooManager(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
    {
        _serviceProvider = serviceProvider;
    }

    public void Start()
    {
        var w1 = _serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<IFooWorker>();  // new instance of FooWorker
        var w2 = _serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<IFooWorker>();  // new instance of FooWorker
    }
}

As goaty mentioned it's enough to create new ServiceCollection. Here's example class which can be used to access DI container in .NET Core:

public static class ServiceProviderFactory
{
    public static IServiceProvider ServiceProvider { get; }

    static ServiceProviderFactory()
    {
        HostingEnvironment env = new HostingEnvironment();
        env.ContentRootPath = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
        env.EnvironmentName = "Development";

        Startup startup = new Startup(env);
        ServiceCollection sc = new ServiceCollection();
        startup.ConfigureServices(sc);
        ServiceProvider = sc.BuildServiceProvider();
    }
}

Startup class is taken from tested project so the service registrations don't need to be repeated.

Then in test class simply use:

var foo = ServiceProviderFactory.ServiceProvider.GetServices(typeof(IFoo));

This is the default implementation of IServiceCollection from Microsoft: https://github.com/aspnet/DependencyInjection/blob/master/src/DI/ServiceCollection.cs

Looking at the code then you should be able to get an IServiceCollection simply by calling:

var serviceCollection = new Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.ServiceCollection();

Hope that helps :)

First you need to install the Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection NuGet package. (docs, API, API)

Then you create a new ServiceCollection and method chain it with the BuildServiceProvider method. In between that you can also register any service providers.

var serviceProvider = new ServiceCollection()
    .AddSingleton<IFooService, FooService>()
    .BuildServiceProvider();