Failed to start Dapr - file does not exist

A short post today; I’ll share an issue a encountered when trying to run a Dapr enabled application. This blog post wouldn’t add much value if I didn’t share a solution as well.

Let me first start by refreshing your memory if you have no clue what Dapr is about. Feel free to skip this intro and move on to the next part if you already tried Dapr before.

Introducing Dapr

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On their website, Dapr is described as:

APIs for Building Secure and Reliable Microservices

I don’t think that is the best description, but if you search deeper in the documentation, you find the following description:

Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless, and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

That describes it perfectly!

Want to know more? Check out this video:

The issue…

One of the nice features of Dapr is that you can use the Dapr CLI to selfhost and run Dapr on your local development machine.

When I tried to run a Dapr enabled application through Aspire(more about this in a later post), I got the following error:

WARNING: no application command found.

Starting Dapr with id alice. HTTP Port: 59140. gRPC Port: 59139

stderr exec: "C:\\Users\\bawu\\.dapr\\bin\\daprd.exe": file does not exist

The solution…

The solution is easy once you know it. Before you can run a Dapr enabled application on your local machine, you first need to initialize it.

This will:

Fetch and install the Dapr sidecar binaries locally.
Create a development environment that streamlines application development with Dapr.

So we need to run dapr init:

C:\Users\bawu>dapr init

Making the jump to hyperspace...

Container images will be pulled from Docker Hub

Installing runtime version 1.13.2

Downloading binaries and setting up components...

Downloaded binaries and completed components set up.

daprd binary has been installed to C:\Users\bawu\.dapr\bin.

dapr_placement container is running.

dapr_redis container is running.

dapr_zipkin container is running.

Use `docker ps` to check running containers.

Success! Dapr is up and running. To get started, go here: https://aka.ms/dapr-getting-started

More information

Initialize Dapr in your local environment | Dapr Docs

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