.NET MAN

Anyone who has fought with installing more than 1 SDK and runtime version of .NET know the pain of getting that to work with existing package management solutions for your specific OS/distro combination. It never just works.

This repo is an optionated wrapper CLI for managing .NET installations. It uses the dotnet-install.sh script behind-the-scenes to run installations.

This installs all your .NET binaries in one location under ~/.dotnet. No more guessing games.

Pre-requisites

Make sure you've set the following system-wide environment variables:

# /etc/profile.d/dotnet.env
export DOTNET_ROOT=${HOME}/.dotnet
export PATH=${PATH}:${HOME}/.dotnet
export PATH=${PATH}:/${HOME}/.dotnet/tools/

This should ensure you have system-wide paths for all your .NET shenanigans like binaries and tools.

I also recommend settings DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 because of reasons.

Usage

Run the binary any way you like. Here I've put it somewhere within my PATH. Dotnetman uses the sync command to install and update your local SDKs and runtimes:

# NOTE: All SDK sync commands include the runtime as well:
dotnetman sync sdk                  # Update all installed SDKs
dotnetman sync sdk --channel 8.0      # Install/Update .NET 8 SDK

# In case you don't need the SDK:
dotnetman sync runtime              # Update all installed runtimes
dotnetman sync runtime --channel 8  # Install/Update .NET 8 SDK

You can also throw a sync config JSON file after it:

# Sync SDKs and runtimes based on config
dotnetman sync --file ./config.json

Here's what that file can look like:

{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "sdk": [
        "8.0",
        "6.0"
    ],
    "runtime": [
        "3.1"
    ]
}

With Docker

This repository also builds a docker image and pushes it to Docker hub if you don't want to download the binary manually. You'll need to map your current user into the running image so we don't mess up file permissions and of course mount the desired install directory, indicated by the DOTNET_ROOT variable here:

## Run a command directly off the image
docker run \
    -v ${DOTNET_ROOT}:/home/bun/.dotnet \
    -u $(id -u):bun \
    buriedstpatrick/dotnetman:v0.0.1-alpha17 <dotnet-man-args-here>

## Optionally, make your life easier with an alias in your shell:
alias dotnetman="docker run -v ${DOTNET_ROOT}:/home/bun/.dotnet -u $(id -u):bun buriedstpatrick/dotnetman:v0.0.1-alpha17"

You can leave out any section here except the version property. This file format will probably change in the future, but for now we're keeping it simple.

Manage SDKs

List installed .NET SDKs (that .NET MAN knows about):

dotnetman list sdk

.NET MAN is an opinionated fella'. He looks at ~/.dotnet/sdk and doesn't care what dotnet --list-sdks says. If you're seeing a discrepancy, then you might have another .NET installation spooking around on your system. I'd get that cleaned up or .NET MAN gets angry.

Build

With bun:

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Run build
bun run build

This builds the binary to ./bin/dotnetman.

With Docker:

# Build
docker build . --tag dotnetman

# Run with:
docker run \
    -v ${DOTNET_ROOT}:/home/bun/.dotnet \
    -u $(id -u):bun \
    dotnetman <dotnet-man-args-here>

# Make your life easier with an alias:
alias dotnetman="docker run -v ${DOTNET_ROOT}:/home/bun/.dotnet -u $(id -u):bun dotnetman"

This binds your host system's DOTNET_ROOT to the container's DOTNET_ROOT location as well as your user to the bun-user that runs inside the container.