Oqtane Notes: Understanding Site Settings vs. App Settings
OK — it’s time for another blog post (or maybe just a mental note) about Oqtane.
I’ve been doing what feels like a million installations of it lately. Honestly, if the Oqtane team gets a notification every time I spin up a new instance, they’re probably tired of seeing my name by now. I’ve been spending nearly every free minute exploring the framework — I love diving into new technologies, digging into the source code, and figuring out how things really work.
One of the most beautiful parts about Oqtane is that it’s open source. You can simply go into the repository and inspect the source code yourself. Some parts might not be obvious at first glance, but the project’s creator, Shaun Walker, is incredibly responsive and helpful to the community. I think I’ve only posted a couple of issues over the years, but every single time I’ve woken up the next morning with a thoughtful response waiting — even though I’m usually several time zones ahead in Europe. He really knows Oqtane inside and out.
Hosting Models and Render Modes
As you probably know, one of Oqtane’s biggest strengths is its flexibility with Blazor hosting models. It can run as Server or WebAssembly, and you can switch between them with a simple configuration change.
On top of that, Oqtane supports different render modes for components: Interactive or Static. In simple terms, you can choose to render content on the server (similar to how PHP works) or make it fully interactive like a standard Blazor app where the state refreshes dynamically.
You can toggle these behaviors with just a few clicks in the admin backend — which is awesome once you understand how the settings are actually applied.
My Confusion (and the Lesson Learned)
This post was originally meant to be a follow-up to the previous one about database configuration, but I ran into an interesting issue while testing API controllers. I wanted to confirm that when I ran the application in WebAssembly mode, it would hit the API controllers correctly.
It didn’t — at least not at first.
I spent quite a while trying to figure out why. Oqtane has both app-level settings (in appsettings.json) and site-level settings (in the admin panel), and it wasn’t immediately clear which ones took priority. I initially thought I could just change the render and runtime options in appsettings.json, restart the app, and see the effect. But it didn’t work that way.
After some trial and error — and a helpful reply from Shaun — I realized my mistake. When you first spin up a new site, Oqtane uses the values defined in appsettings.json. But once that site exists, it maintains its own configuration separately. From that point forward, any runtime or render mode changes must be made in the site settings from the admin panel, not in the original configuration file.
Server Runtime
WebAssembly Runtime
The Takeaway
If you edit appsettings.json after your first site is already created, it won’t affect the existing site — those values only apply when a new site is initialized.
So, to summarize:
- Before the first run → Configure defaults in
appsettings.json. - After the site is running → Change settings from the admin backend.
That was the source of my confusion. Hopefully, this note saves someone else a few hours of head-scratching.
Thanks again to Shaun and the entire Oqtane team for keeping this project alive and so well supported.
These posts are just my personal notes, but I hope they help someone who’s following the same learning path.