Getting Started

Getting Started

Installation

Add the DeviceDetector.NET NuGet package to your project:

dotnet add package DeviceDetector.NET

The core package targets netstandard2.0, net462, net8.0, net9.0 and net10.0, so it works from classic .NET Framework projects up to the latest .NET.

Basic usage

using DeviceDetectorNET;

// OPTIONAL: return full version numbers instead of only major.minor
// (default truncates to VERSION_TRUNCATION_MINOR); see VERSION_TRUNCATION_*
// constants on DeviceDetectorNET.Parser.VersionTruncation
// using DeviceDetectorNET.Parser;
DeviceDetector.SetVersionTruncation(VersionTruncation.VERSION_TRUNCATION_NONE);

var userAgent = Request.Headers["User-Agent"]; // the UA string you want to parse
var headers = Request.Headers.ToDictionary(a => a.Key, a => a.Value.ToArray().FirstOrDefault());
var clientHints = ClientHints.Factory(headers); // Client Hints are optional, see Client-Hints page

var dd = new DeviceDetector(userAgent, clientHints);

// OPTIONAL: set a caching method — see the Caching page
// using DeviceDetectorNET.Cache;
dd.SetCache(new DictionaryCache());

// OPTIONAL: GetBot() only returns non-null if a bot was detected (skips extra parsing)
dd.DiscardBotInformation();

// OPTIONAL: skip bot detection entirely — bots are then parsed as regular devices
dd.SkipBotDetection();

dd.Parse();

if (dd.IsBot())
{
    // handle bots, spiders, crawlers, ...
    var botInfo = dd.GetBot();
}
else
{
    var clientInfo = dd.GetClient();   // browser, feed reader, media player, PIM, ...
    var osInfo = dd.GetOs();
    var device = dd.GetDeviceName();
    var brand = dd.GetBrandName();
    var model = dd.GetModel();
}

One-shot helper

If you don't need to tweak any options, DeviceDetector.GetInfoFromUserAgent runs the whole pipeline in one call and returns a ParseResult<DeviceDetectorResult>:

using DeviceDetectorNET;

var result = DeviceDetector.GetInfoFromUserAgent(userAgent, clientHints);

if (result.Success)
{
    var info = result.Match; // DeviceDetectorResult
}

This is exactly what the bundled demo API and the Serilog enricher use internally.

OS family / browser family helpers

using DeviceDetectorNET.Parser;
var osFamily = OperatingSystemParser.GetOsFamily(dd.GetOs().Match?.Name);

using DeviceDetectorNET.Parser.Client;
var browserFamily = BrowserParser.GetBrowserFamily(dd.GetBrowserClient().Match?.Name);

Custom regex rules directory

The library ships the YAML regex rules under regexes/ next to the assembly. To point at your own copy (e.g. a newer checkout of the upstream device-detector rules):

using DeviceDetectorNET;

DeviceDetectorSettings.RegexesDirectory = @"C:\YamlRegexsFiles\";

Next steps

• Device and Client Type Checks — all the IsSmartphone(), IsBrowser(), etc. helpers
• Client Hints — improving accuracy on modern Chromium browsers
• Caching — avoid re-parsing the same User-Agent repeatedly
• Bot Detection — cheap bot-only detection path