.NET CLI Basics

The dotnet command-line interface (CLI) is the primary tool for creating, building, running, testing, and publishing .NET applications, and it ships with every SDK installation. It works identically on Windows, Linux, and macOS terminals, which means the exact same commands — dotnet new, dotnet build, dotnet run — work regardless of which OS a developer or CI pipeline uses.

dotnet new scaffolds a new project from a template — dotnet new console, dotnet new webapi, and dotnet new classlib are among the most common. Running dotnet new list shows every installed template, and dotnet new install <package> adds third-party templates such as those published by Ocelot or MediatR maintainers. Once a project exists, dotnet run compiles and executes it in one step, automatically restoring NuGet packages first if needed.

dotnet build compiles the project and its dependencies into intermediate output under bin/Debug/<TFM>/ without running it, while dotnet test discovers and executes test projects using frameworks like xUnit, NUnit, or MSTest and reports pass/fail results. dotnet publish produces a deployable output — by default framework-dependent, or self-contained with --self-contained true -r linux-x64 — ready to copy to a server or bake into a Docker image.