My experience using dotnetup on linux

[RikkiGibson]

Previously, my experience of installing dotnet on linux went like this:

• Download the binaries from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/
• Unzip to ~/dotnet
• Ensure shell profile had DOTNET_ROOT set, and DOTNET_ROOT was on the PATH.

And, every new SDK version I wanted to pull in, was another download, then dropping the tarball into ~/dotnet` folder, extracting in-place, and allowing it to overwrite everything it asked to. I have no idea whether this was an expected/supported flow, but, it worked for me.

Installing from package manager was not viable because it didn't get regular updates, not remotely. No "feature band" updates, only major versions. e.g. the last time I checked, only the latest 9.0.1xx was available that way. Probably 10.0.1xx is available now, but, I'm also going to need 10.0.3xx, and so on...

---

Today I got going with dotnetup on linux. The flow was extremely simple:

• Paste the install command into shell and run it
• Paste the given export PATH=... into shell profile and source it
• dotnetup init, mash enter and it does the right thing.
• Source shell profile again (this might have been unnecessary)
• dotnetup install 10.0.109 (specific version that I needed)

and I was there. So now I think I'm setup that in the future dotnetup install 10.0.110 is going to just work. It's going to be the entire task of updating the .NET SDK version.

I think this is a fantastic improvement. You guys did great. Thank you.

[dsplaisted]

Thanks for the feedback and it's great to hear that dotnetup is working well for you.

Note that you might want to use channels instead of specific versions when you install. Then instead of needing to explicitly install each new version, you can simply run dotnetup sdk update. This will update to the latest versions in each tracked channel and uninstall any previous versions that are no longer needed. Some more information is here: https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/blob/release/dnup/documentation/general/dotnetup/usecases/update-installations.md