Dotnet Core Console App Mac

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Say I have a simple “Hello World” console application that I want to send to a friend to run. The friend doesn’t have.NET Core installed so I know I need to build a self contained application for him. Easy, I just run the following command in my project directory: dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c Release.

Disclaimer: I am not on the .NET Core Team. I used the tools available publicly and have no insights into the future of .NET Core. It looks very bright though. :)

The working source code for this project can be found here.

Intro

A complete list of post in this series is included below :

In this post, we’re going to look at running the app from the command line and then the Mac.

Running the App in the Windows Command Prompt

While you can obviously run the app inside of Visual Studio with the F5 command. You should also know that you can run the app inside of the console. Before we begin, make sure you have the app found here. After opening the app or downloading it, open the folder containing the project in the command prompt.

You can run your application here by simply typing :

You will the following output :

The exact same result from running the console app in Visual Studio.

Using dotnet publish to get the app ready for Mac

Dotnet Core Console App Settings

Go ahead and type dotnet publish on the command prompt and then type tree to look at your directory listing as shown below :

You should see the publish directory. Navigate into it and list out the files in the directory :

Core

Take note that the dlls listed below are related to the package reference that we added in the last blog post.

Dotnet Core Console App Configure Services

  • Newtonsoft.Json.dll
  • System.Runtime.Serialization.Primitives.dll

This only leaves the NetCoreConsoleApp.dll which is the Console application that we can run on a Mac (or any other platform that supports .NET Core).

Running the app on a Mac

Finally! It is about time you might say. I agree. Before you can run the app on your Mac, you’re going to need to head back over to the .NET Core downloads page and install OpenSSL and then the SDK (or runtime) if you remember the difference from the first post.

To run this on your Mac, you’ll need to copy the ‘publish’ folder to your Mac. Then open Terminal and you can run the app by just typing :

This is awesome! Now you have an app that run on another platform and you used your existing .NET skillset to create it. I’m LOVING .NET Core!

Dotnet New Console App

Wrap-up

Dot Net Core Console App Cli

OK, I’m going to take a break and I’ll be back next week. As always, thanks for reading and smash one of those share buttons to give this post some love if you found it helpful. Also, feel free to leave a comment below or follow me on twitter for daily links and tips.