Do we need interfaces for dependency injection?

Does it work? Yes. Should you do it? No.

Dependency Injection is a tool for the principle of Dependency Inversion : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle

Or as it's described in SOLID

one should “depend upon abstractions, [not] concretions."

You can just inject concrete classes all over the place and it will work. But it's not what DI was designed to achieve.


I won't try to cover what others have already mentioned, using interfaces with DI will often be the best option. But it's worth mentioning that using object inheritance at times may provide another useful option. So for example:

public class Storage
 {
    public virtual Task Download(string file)
    {
    }
 }


public class DiskStorage: Storage
 {
    public override Task Download(string file)
    {
    }
 }

and registering it like so:

services.AddScoped<Storage, DiskStorage>();

No, you don't need interfaces for dependency injection. But dependency injection is much more useful with them!

As you noticed, you can register concrete types with the service collection and ASP.NET Core will inject them into your classes without problems. The benefit you get by injecting them over simply creating instances with new Storage() is service lifetime management (transient vs. scoped vs. singleton).

That's useful, but only part of the power of using DI. As @DavidG pointed out, the big reason why interfaces are so often paired with DI is because of testing. Making your consumer classes depend on interfaces (abstractions) instead of other concrete classes makes them much easier to test.

For example, you could create a MockStorage that implements IStorage for use during testing, and your consumer class shouldn't be able to tell the difference. Or, you can use a mocking framework to easily create a mocked IStorage on the fly. Doing the same thing with concrete classes is much harder. Interfaces make it easy to replace implementations without changing the abstraction.