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Tool Installation

Use this guide to locally install tools. In some cases, globally installed tools may fail to work or have different versions than the ones used for the build.

Initialize Manifest​

dotnet new tool-manifest

This adds a dotnet-tools.json file to the project under the .config folder.

Contents of dotnet-tools.json:

{
  "version": 1,
  "isRoot": true,
  "tools": {}
}

Install Tools​

For the example, let's install dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator:

dotnet tool install --local dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator

Now the tool is installed and the dotnet-tools.json file is updated:

{
  "version": 1,
  "isRoot": true,
  "tools": {
    "dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator": {
      "version": "5.0.0",
      "commands": [
        "dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Run Tools​

Normally globally installed tools can be run with the dotnet command. Locally installed tools need to be run with the dotnet tool run command.

To run the tool, use the dotnet command:

dotnet tool run dotnet-aspnet-codegenerator [options]