With the release of .NET Core 2.1 the .NET Core CLI includes a feature called Global Tools that provides a simple way to create and share cross-platform console tools.
When you install a global tool, the CLI will download a special NuGet package that contains a console application and make your console tool available as a new command from the command line.
Note: You will need to download .NET Core 2.1 to use this to try this on your own.
To install a global tool you execute “dotnet tool install”. For example to install the “amazing-tool” you would run:
dotnet tool install -g amazing-tool
Once you have the “amazing-tool” installed, now you can run it from the command line. The -h used below is the standard for seeing the help.
amazing-tool -h
Unfortunately, one of the features that is missing though is the ability to search a registery of all of the available tools out there. I did find a really nice list of tools from Nate McMaster at https://github.com/natemcmaster/dotnet-tools
In our next article, we will start to take a look at a few of the global tools that I am using.