.NET Commands

A tool that allows you to use any executable as a .NET CLI Command, with special treatment for .NET Core apps.

Any tool can be a .NET CLI tool, it just has to be in the path, and be named dotnet-*. What .NET Commands does is get the tool from nuget and wire it to the path. It is simple and easy to create tools, and simple and easy to install, update and uninstall tools.

This is a community project, free and open source. Everyone is invited to contribute, fork, share and use the code.

Installing

Use your favorite shell.

Powershell

&{$wc=New-Object System.Net.WebClient;$wc.Proxy=[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy;$wc.Proxy.Credentials=[System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials;Invoke-Expression($wc.DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lambda3/dotnet-commands/master/src/dotnet-commands/install.ps1'))}

CMD

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "&{$wc=New-Object System.Net.WebClient;$wc.Proxy=[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy;$wc.Proxy.Credentials=[System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials;Invoke-Expression($wc.DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lambda3/dotnet-commands/master/src/dotnet-commands/install.ps1'))}"

Bash, sh, Fish, etc...

\curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lambda3/dotnet-commands/master/src/dotnet-commands/install.sh | bash

Running

Simply run dotnet commands to see the options, which are similar to this:

.NET Commands

  Usage:
    dotnet commands install <command>[@<version>] [--force] [--pre] [--verbose]
    dotnet commands uninstall <command> [ --verbose]
    dotnet commands update (<command> | all) [--pre] [--verbose]
    dotnet commands (list|ls) [--verbose]
    dotnet commands --help
    dotnet commands --version

  Options:
    --force                    Installs even if package was already installed. Optional.
    --pre                      Include pre-release versions. Ignored if version is supplied. Optional.
    --verbose                  Verbose. Optional.
    --help -h                  Show this screen.
    --version -v               Show version.

You can try to install dotnet-foo, a harmless library to experiment with (the code is in this repo here).

dotnet commands install dotnet-foo

And you can then use dotnet-foo like this:

dotnet foo

dotnet-foo will only work on Windows.

You can also try dotnet-bar (code here), which exposes dotnet bar-aa and dotnet bar-bb commands, and will work on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Writing commands

It is very simple, either:

• Create a Nuget which contains an executable (*.exe, *.ps1, or *.cmd) in the tools folder named dotnet-yourtool;
• Or add a commandMetadata.json similar to the one in this project and add it to the content folder.

If we find project.json files we will restore them. So, feel free to add any .NET Core Tool, and you don't need to add it's dependencies to your nupkg, they will be installed when your project is installed, just remember to add them to your project.json file.

If you have a project.json file but your tools is not a .NET Core tool, but a full framework (desktop framework, .NET Framework, i.e. .NET 4.6.1) tool you will need to add the dependencies to the your nupkg, as those are stand alone tools, and will not run using .NET CLI, because they produce binaries which cannot be bootstrapped.

Non .NET tool work as well, just follow the rules above.

Status

• We can't yet install a specific version.

PRs welcome.

Maintainers/Core team

• Giovanni Bassi, aka Giggio, Lambda3, @giovannibassi

Contributors can be found at the contributors page on Github.

Contact

Twitter is the best option.

License

This software is open source, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.txt for details. Check out the terms of the license before you contribute, fork, copy or do anything with the code. If you decide to contribute you agree to grant copyright of all your contribution to this project, and agree to mention clearly if do not agree to these terms. Your work will be licensed with the project at Apache V2, along the rest of the code.