README.md

About

After many years using npm it always bothered me that there wasn't an easy way to define build, test, and package scripts for my .NET projects. I'd usually end up using PowerShell scripts in a /scripts folder or a tool like Cake, both of which can be cumbersome to discover and use, especially for newcomers to a project who most likely aren't familiar with them.

When .NET Core introduced the dotnet cli it became easier to do these things, but you still needed to pass additional arguments to build in release mode or put test results in a common folder to upload to Codecov or Coveralls.

A great example of this is collecting code coverage of unit tests with Coverlet.

> dotnet test --configuration Debug --verbosity minimal --no-build --collect:"XPlat Code Coverage" --results-directory "./coverage"

Now this can be configured in your global.json like so:

{
  "scripts": {
    "test": "dotnet test --configuration Debug --verbosity minimal --no-build",
    "test:coverage": "dotnet r test -- --collect:\\\"XPlat Code Coverage\\\" --results-directory \"./.codecoverage\""
  }
}

Now a basic test run can be done by calling:

> dotnet r test

Or code coverage can be collected by calling:

> dotnet r test:coverage

What this isn't

This tool is not a replacement for a more robust build tool like Cake or Fake. Instead it's meant to be used as a way to more easily call them by defining a common set of commands like clean, build, test, package, or publish that can be added to all of your projects without the user knowing, or caring, how they work or what they do. By defining them in the project's global.json they're easy to find, and running dotnet r or dotnet r --help will give a list of available scripts so you don't have to go looking for them.