Restore Root CMS episerver Login Path In .NET 5

Introduction

With the release of CMS 12 there was the removal of dashboards which has caused the base login path to not work when created in a new project via the steps documented here https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/CMS/getting-started/creating-a-starter-project/ 

Now with the out of the box code you have to navigate to /episerver/cms to access the CMS Editing area.

Although you can change the path to the CMS editing experience with the documented approach https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/CMS/configuration/changing-edit-and-admin-view-urls/ it does not work to change this to just /episerver as there needs to be a subpath for the CMS experience.

Solution

Using the ASP.NET Rewriting Middleware https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/url-rewriting?view=aspnetcore-5.0 we can add a redirect to reirect /episerver to /episerver/cms

First add the nuget package

dotnet add package Microsoft.AspNetCore.Rewrite --version 2.2.0

Then add in the redirect to the Startup.cs configure code

var options = new RewriteOptions().AddRedirect("episerver$", "episerver/cms");
app.UseRewriter(options);

Conclusion

This is something simple but I've seen people confused https://world.optimizely.com/forum/developer-forum/CMS/Thread-Container/2021/11/cms12-emptystarter-project-not-working/ therefore I wanted to post about it and propose an easy solution to remedy the problem. Ideally when you go to the root /episerver as everyone is used to doing you want to go to the CMS which this will do.

Also as a note now that Episerver is no longer the company name it strikes me odd to preserve it so I would follow the approach in https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/CMS/configuration/changing-edit-and-admin-view-urls/ anyhow and consider changing the default URL path to remove the old brand. Such as /cms/cms with a redirect from /cms &  /episerver to /cms/cms or any name of your choice :-) 

Happy coding!! Add any thoughts, errors or suggestions in the comments below!!