Saturday, February 16, 2019

Building a self-contained .NET Core app in a container

Last week I needed to
  1. Build a self-contained .NET Core app.
  2. Not install the .NET Core SDK on the CI server
  3. Fit this into a build pipeline that was already containerized.
These three requirements led me to build the self-contained app in a container. Doing that is a 2 step process:
  1. First build a container using docker build
  2. The run the container with a local folder called "output" as a volume
The result is that the self-contained app is in the local "output" folder.
This is a Dockerfile that allows this:


And the two commands needed to build and run the container are:


That builds the self-contained app into .\output\release\netcoreapp2.2\linux-x64\publish\

For context: In my case I needed to build DbUp as part of the build pipeline for a service that I run in a container. I want DbUp to be self-contained so I can run it during the deployment pipeline without needing to install the .NET Core runtime.