.NET Core 2.1 - dotnet/exe on build, packages are missing

Question

I've been developing on one machine and recently tried to install my application on another PC. I think I've deduced to to the nuget packages not being found since in .NET Core, nuget puts the packages in the local 'Users' folder path.

I initially added the <RunTimeIdentifier> tag to create an exe (which worked on my developer machine). When running the exe on a different machine, the console window will flash very quickly and application stops with no error output (even in Event Viewer).

I also added this tag <PublishWithAspNetCoreTargetManifest>false</PublishWithAspNetCoreTargetManifest

in the *.csproj which did not make a difference.

So I tried running dotnet project.dll which gave me this error on the other machine.

An assembly specified in the application dependencies manifest (project.deps.json) was not found:

package: 'Localization.AspNetCore.TagHelpers', version: '0.3.0'

path: 'lib/netstandard1.6.1/Localization.AspNetCore.TagHelpers.dll'

When I 'recreated' the folder structure, lo-and-behold, everything was working. Is there a way on compile/build that those packages are copied to the bin folder and paths reference those instead? Or am I building/compiling wrong?

Also note that thie project was updated from .NET Core 2.0 to 2.1.

Answer 1

Short Answer

It sounds like you want a self-contained deployment. That is what dotnet publish --self-contained --runtime <some-runtime> outputs to the publish directory.

Two Examples

Lets say we have an app at C:\temp\temp.csproj, and we want to publish it to two target platforms.

If we publish like this...

dotnet publish --self-contained --runtime win-x86

... the self-contained executable will be here:

C:\dev\temp\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1\win-x86\publish\temp.exe

If we publish like this...

dotnet publish --self-contained --runtime ubuntu-x64

... the self-contained executable will be here:

C:\dev\temp\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.1\ubuntu-x64\publish\temp

If we then copy the entire publish directory to the destination computer, we can execute the temp executable, because all of its dependencies are present.