ChromaDotNet

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The Aspire integration of ChromaDotNet joins the Aspire Community Toolkit

Federico Laurianti, 25 October 2026

Aspire runs the services of a distributed application, and the resources they depend on, from one AppHost project. The Chroma integrations of ChromaDotNet, one for hosting and one for the client, are now part of the Aspire Community Toolkit: the pull request CommunityToolkit/Aspire#2219 was merged on 12 October 2026.

Until the toolkit publishes its own packages, the same integrations are on NuGet as ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Hosting and ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Client, version 0.2.9.

What it does

  • ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Hosting runs a Chroma container in the AppHost, chromadb/chroma:1.5.9 by default, and keeps its data in a volume or in a folder of your choice.
  • ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Client gives each service a ChromaClient of ChromaDotNet.Client, from the connection that the AppHost passes to it, with health checks, traces and metrics. Each of the three can be turned off in the settings.

How to use it

In the AppHost:

Shell
dotnet add package ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Hosting
C#
var chroma = builder.AddChroma("chroma").WithDataVolume();

builder.AddProject<Projects.ApiService>("api")
    .WithReference(chroma)
    .WaitFor(chroma);

In the service:

Shell
dotnet add package ChromaDotNet.Aspire.Client
C#
builder.AddChromaClient("chroma");

The service then takes the ChromaClient from dependency injection.

Thanks

  • Aaron Powell, for the review of the integrations and for merging them into the toolkit.

Links

ChromaDotNet is a personal open source project of Federico Laurianti. Independent project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Chroma Inc. CHROMA is a registered trademark of Chroma Inc., used here only to describe compatibility.