Exploring .NET Core CLI and New Project Templates

Command Line Interface (CLI) is a very popular tool is almost all popular frameworks like Yeoman Generator, Angular, and others. It lends developers access to execute commands to create, build, and run projects, restore packages, and so on.

.NET CLI provides a toolset with a handful commands that can be executed from the command line interface to create .NET Core projects, restore dependencies, and build and run projects. Under the wire, Visual Studio 2015/2017 and Visual Studio Code even uses this tool to perform different options taken by the developers from their IDE; for example, to create a new project using .NET CLI, we can run the following command:

dotnet new 

It will list down the available templates and the short name that can be used while creating the project.

Here is the screenshot containing the list of project templates that can be used to create/scaffold projects using .NET Core CLI:

And by running the following command, a new ASP.NET Core MVC application will be created:

dotnet new mvc 

The following screenshot shows the provisioning of the new MVC project after running the preceding command. It creates the project in the same directory where the command is running and restores all the dependencies:

To install the .NET Core CLI toolset, there are some native installers available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. These installers can install and set up the .NET CLI tooling on your machine and developers can run the commands from the CLI.

Here is the list of commands with their descriptions that are provided in the .NET Core CLI:

Command	Description	Example
new	Creates a new project based on the template selected	dotnet new razor
restore	Restores all the dependencies defined in the project	dotnet restore
build	Builds the project	dotnet build
run	Runs the source code without any additional compile	dotnet run
publish	Packages the application files into a folder for deployment	dotnet publish
test	Used to execute unit tests	dotnet test
vstest	Executes unit tests from specified files	dotnet vstest [<TEST_FILE_NAMES>]
pack	Packs the code into a NuGet package	dotnet pack
migrate	Migrates .NET Core preview 2 to .NET Core 1.0	dotnet migrate
clean	Cleans the output of the project	dotnet clean
sln	Modifies a .NET Core solution	dotnet sln
help	Displays the list of commands available to execute through .NET CLI	dotnet help
store	Stores the specified assemblies in the runtime package store	dotnet store

 

Here are some of the project level commands that can be used to add a new NuGet package, remove an existing one, list references, and others:

Command	Description	Example
add package	Adds a package reference to the project	dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json
remove package	Removes a package reference from the project	dotnet remove package Newtonsoft.Json
add reference	Adds a project reference to the project	dotnet add reference chapter1/proj1.csproj
remove reference	Removes the project reference from the project	dotnet remove reference chapter1/proj1.csproj
list reference	List down all the project references in the project	dotnet list reference

The following are some common Entity Framework Core commands that can be used to add migration, remove migration, update the database, and so on.

Command	Description	Example
dotnet ef migrations add	Adds a new migration	dotnet ef migrations add Initial - Initial is the name of migration
dotnet ef migrations list	List available migrations	dotnet ef migrations list
dotnet ef migrations remove	Remove specific migration	dotnet ef migrations remove Initial - Initial is the name of migration
dotnet ef database update	To update the database to a specified migration	dotnet ef database update Initial - Initial is the name of migration
dotnet ef database drop	Drops the database	dotnet ef database drop

Here are some of the server level commands that can be used to delete the NuGet package from its actual source repository from the machine, add NuGet package into its actual source repository on the machine, and so on:

Command	Description	Example
nuget delete	Deletes the package from the server	dotnet nuget delete Microsoft.AspNetCore.App 2.0
nuget push	Pushes a package to the server and publishes it	dotnet nuget push foo.nupkg
nuget locals	Lists the local NuGet resources	dotnet nuget locals -l all
msbuild	Builds a project and all of its dependencies	dotnet msbuild
dotnet install script	The script to install the .NET CLI tools and the shared runtime	./dotnet-install.ps1 -Channel LTS

To run the preceding commands, we can use the tool known as dotnet from the command line and specify the actual command followed by that. When the .NET Core CLI is installed, it is set into the PATH variable in Windows OS and can be accessed from any folder. So, for example, if you are at your project root folder and wanted to restore the dependencies, you can just call the following command and it will restore all the dependencies that have been defined in your project file:

dotnet restore

The preceding command will start restoring the dependencies or project-specific tools, as defined in the project file. The restoration of tools and dependencies are done in parallel:

We can also set the path where packages can be restored by using the --packages argument. However, if this is not specified, it uses the .nuget/packages folder under the system's user folder. For example, the default NuGet folder for Windows OS is {systemdrive}:\Users\{user}\.nuget\packages and /home/{user} for Linux OS, respectively.