piraces / dotnex

A simple .NET tool to execute other dotnet tools without installing them globally or in a project

dotnex

A simple .NET tool to execute other dotnet tools without installing them globally or in a project (a similar approach to npx from npm).

View in Nuget.org

About

This simple tool provides the minimum necessary to run dotnet tools without the need of installing them globally or in a project, since this is not yet supported in dotnet cli.

Features:

• Cache. This tool provides caching of used tools in a temporary directory (for better performance).

• Version and framework selection. You can specify whatever version you want and the target framework to use in every run.

• SourceLink for debugging. The binaries can be debbuged with Source Link. Example (with Developer Command Prompt for VS): devenv /debugexe c:\Users\rich\.dotnet\tools\dotnex.exe

• Symbols package. A symbols package is published too in the publish process in order to ease the debugging of the NuGet package.

Usage

dotnex [options] <TOOL> [<TOOL-ARGS>...]

Where the arguments and options are the following:

Arguments:
  <TOOL>       The NuGet Package Id of the tool to execute []
  <TOOL-ARGS>  Arguments to pass to the tool to execute

Options:
  -v, --use-version <use-version>  Version of the tool to use
  -f, --framework <framework>      Target framework for the tool
  -r, --remove-cache               Flag to remove the local cache before running the tool (can be run without tool)
  --version                        Show version information
  -?, -h, --help                   Show help and usage information

This same output can be obtained running the tool with the help option:

dotnex -h

Example with the simple dotnetsay tool:

dotnex dotnetsay Hello World!!

Installation

Install the dotnet cli (included in the .NET SDK) and then run the following command:

dotnet tool install -g dotnex

SDK version

dotnex is published for all current supported SDKs from Microsoft:

• .NET Core 3.1.x
• .NET 5.0.x
• .NET 6.0.x

The main idea is to maintain dotnex up-to-date with all current supported SDKs from Microsoft.

Contributions

Feel free to open an issue or a PR if you want to without any problem :)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

See the LICENSE file in the root of this repository.

dotnex's Issues

Name similar to npx - dotnetx / dotnex

This is a really nice tool. Thanks!

I like how similar it is to npx.

The name however is really hard to remember! 😄 It would be nice to have an alias like dotnetx or dotnex.

It could be added as an alias (not to replace dotnet-tool-run) so that it's backwards compatible.