Developer Guide

Prerequisites

In order to build .NET Command Line Interface, you need the following installed on you machine.

For Windows

git (available from http://www.git-scm.com/) on the PATH.

For Linux

git (available from http://www.git-scm.com/) on the PATH.

For OS X

Xcode
git (available from http://www.git-scm.com/) on the PATH.
Install OpenSSL (a .NET Core requirement)

brew install openssl
brew link --force openssl

Building/Running

Run build.cmd or build.sh from the root depending on your OS. If you don't want to execute tests, run build.cmd /t:Compile or ./build.sh /t:Compile.

To build the CLI in macOS Sierra, you need to set the DOTNET_RUNTIME_ID environment variable by running export DOTNET_RUNTIME_ID=osx.10.11-x64.

Use artifacts/{RID}/stage2/dotnet to try out the dotnet command. You can also add artifacts/{os}-{arch}/stage2 to the PATH if you want to use the build output when invoking dotnet from the current console.

A simple test

Using the dotnet built in the previous step:

cd {new directory}
dotnet new
dotnet restore3
dotnet run3

Running tests

To run all tests invoke build.cmd or build.sh which will build the product and run the tests.
To run a specific test, cd into that test's directory and execute dotnet test. If using this approach, make sure to add artifacts/{RID}/stage2 to your PATH and set the NUGET_PACKAGES environment variable to point to the repo's .nuget/packages directory.

Adding a Command

The dotnet CLI supports several models for adding new commands:

In the CLI itself via dotnet.dll
Through a tool NuGet package
Through MSBuild tasks & targets in a NuGet package
Via the user's PATH

Commands in dotnet.dll

Developers are generally encouraged to avoid adding commands to dotnet.dll or the CLI installer directly. This is appropriate for very general commands such as restore, build, publish, test, and clean, but is generally too broad of a distribution mechanism for new commands. Please create an issue and engage the team if you feel there is a missing core command that you would like to add.

Tools NuGet packages

Many existing extensions, including those for ASP.NET Web applications, extend the CLI using Tools NuGet packages. For an example of a working packaged command look at TestAssets/TestPackages/dotnet-hello/v1/.

MSBuild tasks & targets

NuGet allows adding tasks and targets to a project through a NuGet package. This mechanism, in fact, is how all .NET Core projects pull in the .NET SDK. Extending the CLI through this model has several advantages:

Targets have access to the MSBuild Project Context, allowing them to reason about the files and properties being used to build a particular project.
Targets are not CLI-specific, making them easy to share across command-line and IDE environments

Commands added as targets can be invoked once the target project adds a reference to the containing NuGet package and restores. Targets are invoked by calling dotnet msbuild /t:{TargetName}

Commands on the PATH

The dotnet CLI considers any executable on the path named dotnet-{commandName} to be a command it can call out to.

Things to Know

Any added commands are usually invoked through dotnet {command}. As a result of this, stdout and stderr are redirected through the driver (dotnet) and buffered by line. As a result of this, child commands should use Console.WriteLine in any cases where they expect output to be written immediately. Any uses of Console.Write should be followed by Console.WriteLine to ensure the output is written.

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