How to plug my Autofac container into ASP. NET Identity 2.1

I’m starting from an out-of-the-box MVC5 installation and using AutoFac as an IoC container. It sounds like I am trying to acheive a similar goal as you, so let me explain what I’ve done. As a disclaimer, I am fairly new to using IoC and to Identity.

I believe the IOwinContext is unnecessary in a role as an IoC if you are using your own – I switched over to registering my ApplicationUserManager with AutoFac. To achieve this I had to:

Remove CreatePerOwinContext lines from Startup.Auth since I’ll register ApplicationDbContext and ApplicationUserManager in AutoFac.

//app.CreatePerOwinContext(ApplicationDbContext.Create);
//app.CreatePerOwinContext<ApplicationUserManager>(ApplicationUserManager.Create);

Modify the ApplicationUserManager constructor arguments and included everything from the Create function.

public ApplicationUserManager(IUserStore<ApplicationUser> store, IdentityFactoryOptions<ApplicationUserManager> options)
        : base(store)
{
    //all the code from the 'Create' function here, using `this` for `manager`
}

Set the AccountController to have a single constructor taking an ApplicationUserManager as an argument and scrapped the UserManager property that grabs the ApplicationUserManager from the OwinContext.

private ApplicationUserManager _userManager; //every thing that needs the old UserManager property references this now
public AccountController(ApplicationUserManager userManager) 
{
    _userManager = userManager;
}

Register everything with AutoFac, including an instance of IdentityFactoryOptions.

var x = new ApplicationDbContext();
builder.Register<ApplicationDbContext>(c => x);
builder.Register<UserStore<ApplicationUser>>(c => new UserStore<ApplicationUser>(x)).AsImplementedInterfaces();
builder.Register<IdentityFactoryOptions<ApplicationUserManager>>(c => new IdentityFactoryOptions<ApplicationUserManager>()
{
    DataProtectionProvider = new Microsoft.Owin.Security.DataProtection.DpapiDataProtectionProvider("ApplicationName")
});
builder.RegisterType<ApplicationUserManager>();

That’s the rough summary. I may have missed a couple of other tweaks I had to do along the way.