To accommodate having one Nancy application that we can host in two different ways, we need to do a little bit of restructuring. Looking at the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio, we want to end up with this structure:

In the previous screenshot, all the application code is in the TodoNancy project, the ASP.NET hosting is in the TodoNancyAspNet, and the self-hosting is in the TodoNancySelfHost. First step towards this structure is to rename the current TodoNancy project to TodoNancyAspNet and also to rename the corresponding file system folder as TodoNancy.

Create a new class library called TodoNancy and move all code in the files from TodoNancyAspNet except web.config and packages.config to it.

Install the Nancy, Nancy.Authentication.WorldDomination, Nancy.ViewEngines.Razor, NLog, mongocsharpdriver, and protobuf-net NuGet packages in TodoNancy.

Uninstall the Nancy.Authentication.WorldDomination, Nancy.ViewEngines.Razor, NLog, mongocsharpdriver, and protobuf-net NuGet packages from TodoNancyAspNet.

Add a project reference from TodoNancyAspNet to TodoNancy.

At this point, the solution should compile, all tests should run, and the application should work if you run the TodoNancyAspNet project. Try it out.

Create a new console application called TodoNancySelfHost.

Install the Nancy.Hosting.Self NuGet in TodoNancySelfHost.

Add a project reference from TodoNancySelfHost to TodoNancy.

Add the following code to program.cs in TodoNancySelfHost:

namespace TodoNancySelfHost
{
  using System;
  using Nancy.Hosting.Self;
  using TodoNancy;

  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      TodosModule artificiaReference;
      var nancyHost = new NancyHost(new Uri("http://localhost:8080/"));
      nancyHost.Start();

      Console.ReadKey();

      nancyHost.Stop();
    }
  }
}

Add the following code to app.config in TodoNancy:

<appSettings>
  <add key="MONGOLAB_URI" value="mongodb://localhost:27017/todos"/>
</appSettings>

The only thing left to do is to make the self-hosted version work, which allows your user to listen on locahost:8080. You can do this with the following netsh command:

PS C:\> netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8080/ user=DOMAIN\USERNAME

If you run the TodoNancySelfHost project and go to localhost:8080, you should see the familiar TodoNancy application.