With the Dapr Distributed Lock package, you can create and remove locks on resources to manage exclusivity across your distributed applications.

While this capability is implemented in both the Dapr.Client and Dapr.DistributedLock packages, the approach differs slightly between them and a future release will see the Dapr.Client package be deprecated. It’s recommended that new implementations use the Dapr.DistributedLock package. This document will reflect the implementation in the Dapr.DistributedLock package.

Lifetime management

A DaprDistributedLockClient is a version of the Dapr client that is dedicated to interacting with Dapr’s distributed lock API. It can be registered alongside a DaprClient and other Dapr clients without issue.

It maintains access to networking resources in the form of TCP sockets used to communicate with the Dapr sidecar runtime.

For best performance, it is recommended that you utilize the dependency injection container mechanisms provided with the Dapr.DistributedLock package to provide easy access to an injected instance throughout your application. These injected instances are thread-safe and intended to be used across different types within your application. Registration via dependency injection can utilize values from an IConfiguration or other injected services in a way that’s impractical when creating the client from scratch in each of your classes.

If you do opt to manually create a DaprDistributedLockClient instance, it is recommended that you use the DaprClientBuilder to create the client. This will ensure that the client is properly configured to communicate with the Dapr sidecar runtime.`

Avoid creawting a DaprDistributedLockClient for each operation.

Configuring a DaprDistributedLockClient via DaprDistributedLockBuilder

A DaprDistributedLockClient can be configured by invoking methods on the DaprDistributedLockBuilder class before calling .Build() to create the client itself. The settings for each DaprDistributedLockClient are separate and cannot be changed after calling .Build().

var daprDistributedLockClient = new DaprDistributedLockBuilder()
    .UseDaprApiToken("abc123") // Optionally specify the API token used to authenticate to other Dapr sidecars
    .Build();

The DaprDistributedLockBuilder contains settings for:

• The HTTP endpoint of the Dapr sidecar
• The gRPC endpoint of the Dapr sidecar
• The JsonSerializerOptions object used to configure JSON serialization
• The GrpcChannelOptions object used to configure gRPC
• The API token used to authenticate requests to the sidecar
• The factory method used to create the HttpClient instance used by the SDK
• The timeout used for the HttpClient instance when making requests to the sidecar

The SDK will read the following environment variables to configure the default values:

• DAPR_HTTP_ENDPOINT: used to find the HTTP endpoint of the Dapr sidecar, example: https://dapr-api.mycompany.com
• DAPR_GRPC_ENDPOINT: used to find the gRPC endpoint of the Dapr sidecar, example: https://dapr-grpc-api.mycompany.com
• DAPR_HTTP_PORT: if DAPR_HTTP_ENDPOINT is not set, this is used to find the HTTP local endpoint of the Dapr sidecar
• DAPR_GRPC_PORT: if DAPR_GRPC_ENDPOINT is not set, this is used to find the gRPC local endpoint of the Dapr sidecar
• DAPR_API_TOKEN: used to set the API token

Configuring gRPC channel options

Dapr’s use of CancellationToken for cancellation relies on the configuration of the gRPC channel options. If you need to configure these options yourself, make sure to enable the ThrowOperationCanceledOnCancellation setting.

var daprDistributedLockClient = new DaprDistributedLockBuilder()
    .UseGrpcChannelOptions(new GrpcChannelOptions { ... ThrowOperationCanceledOnCancellation = true })
    .Build();

Using cancellation with DaprDistributedLockClient

The APIs on DaprDistributedLockClient perform asynchronous operations and accept an optional CancellationToken parameter. This follows a standard .NET practice for cancellable operations. Note that when cancellation occurs, there is no guarantee that the remote endpoint stops processing the request, only that the client has stopped waiting for completion.

When an operation is cancelled, it will throw an OperationCancelledException.

Configuring DaprDistributedLockClient via dependency injection

Using the built-in extension methods for registering the DaprDistributedLockClient in a dependency injection container can provide the benefit of registering the long-lived service a single time, centralize complex configuration and improve performance by ensuring similarly long-lived resources are re-purposed when possible (e.g. HttpClient instances).

There are three overloads available to give the developer the greatest flexibility in configuring the client for their scenario. Each of these will register the IHttpClientFactory on your behalf if not already registered, and configure the DaprDistributedLockBuilder to use it when creating the HttpClient instance in order to re-use the same instance as much as possible and avoid socket exhaustion and other issues.

In the first approach, there’s no configuration done by the developer and the DaprDistributedLockClient is configured with the default settings.

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddDaprDistributedLock(); //Registers the `DaprDistributedLockClient` to be injected as needed
var app = builder.Build();

Sometimes the developer will need to configure the created client using the various configuration options detailed above. This is done through an overload that passes in the DaprDistributedLockBuilder and exposes methods for configuring the necessary options.

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddDaprDistributedLock((_, daprDistributedLockBuilder) => {
   //Set the API token
   daprDistributedLockBuilder.UseDaprApiToken("abc123");
   //Specify a non-standard HTTP endpoint
   daprDistributedLockBuilder.UseHttpEndpoint("http://dapr.my-company.com");
});

var app = builder.Build();

Finally, it’s possible that the developer may need to retrieve information from another service in order to populate these configuration values. That value may be provided from a DaprClient instance, a vendor-specific SDK or some local service, but as long as it’s also registered in DI, it can be injected into this configuration operation via the last overload:

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

//Register a fictional service that retrieves secrets from somewhere
builder.Services.AddSingleton<SecretService>();

builder.Services.AddDaprDistributedLock((serviceProvider, daprDistributedLockBuilder) => {
    //Retrieve an instance of the `SecretService` from the service provider
    var secretService = serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<SecretService>();
    var daprApiToken = secretService.GetSecret("DaprApiToken").Value;

    //Configure the `DaprDistributedLockBuilder`
    daprDistributedLockBuilder.UseDaprApiToken(daprApiToken);
});

var app = builder.Build();