How do I re-use assigned ports?

[NikiforovAll]

Context:

As a developer, I want to be able to configure my tooling and use it between application restarts.

E.g: I configured tooling to interact with a database and want to use it between application restarts. How would I achieve that?

Currently, I constantly check the content of connection strings and logs to find corresponding services. The workflow is somewhat tedious and interrupts me from the "flow".

[davidfowl]

You can set ports and passwords manually. That's the best option when you are using external tools. The Aspire.Hosting.* packages should have methods that let you specify the port and password (if they generate one on the fly).

[NikiforovAll]

WithPgAdmin doesn't provide this option. Should it be fixed?

var usersDb = builder
    .AddPostgres("dbserver", pAdmin, password)
    .WithDataVolume()
    .WithPgAdmin()
    .AddDatabase("users-db");

[davidfowl]

var usersDb = builder
    .AddPostgres("dbserver", pAdmin, password)
    .WithDataVolume()
    .WithPgAdmin(c => c.WithHostPort(8001))
    .AddDatabase("users-db");

[NikiforovAll]

From my point of view, it would be great to persist randomly assigned ports between sessions without assigning values explicitly in AppHost.

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args).WithPersistentExternalPorts();

[davidfowl]

Not sure, that requires state. Launch profiles are visible state that can be tweaked, understood, and changed by users. I think we'd need something similar here. Not a bad idea overall but I'm not a fan of this method.