Skip to main content

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

image card

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

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...