Publish

Single File Binary Publishing

You can publish a dotnet project as a single file self-contained binary by using the publish command in conjunction with the PublishSingleFile property set to true and the --runtime flag specified to the OS you want to deploy on. In tht example below it is the PublishSingleFile that actually causes the publisher to package the binary into a single self-contained file.

dotnet publish -r <PLATFORM> -c release -o <OUTPUT_PATH> -p:PublishingSingleFile=true

For example a self-contained single file linux deployment would be

dotnet publish -r linux-x64 -c release -o deploys/out -p:PublishingSingleFile=true

Runtime

You can set the deployment runtime with the -r or --runtime flag. If this is not set it will default to the operating system you are developing on.

The platform value for targeting different operating systems can be

• win-x86
• win-x64
• linux-x64
• osx-x64

Self-contained and Framework-dependent applications

There are two types of application deployments:

• self-contained: applications have the entire .NET runtime and any dependency libraries bundled with it
• framework-dependent: applications have a cross platform .dll binary that can run on any system and a platform specific entry point

It’s important to note that a self-contained application is NOT the same as a single file application. The --self-contained flag is set to true by default. This will create a deploy that still has all the individual .dll files even though the entire application is self-contained and does not require the .NET run time to work. You can still set --self-contained to true for semantic significance or to combat other configuration changes in the future.

You can deploy a framework-dependent binary by specifying --self-contained as false.

dotnet publish --self-contained false

Ready to Run applications

You can improve run time speed with ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation by using the PublishReadyToRun property. This substantially increases the size of the binary but can improve run time especially for large applications. It’s not advisable to use this for small applications.

dotnet publish -p:PublishReadyToRun=true

Trimmed applications

You can trim the size of self-contained applications by using the PublishTrimmed property. This will result in a substantially reduced binary size. This will strip out uneeded parts of the .NET runtime, however, its deemed an unstable feature and can cause issues when depdencies are not clearly indicated at runtime or when reflection is used. It’s also possible to configure options for the trimming in the project file.

dotnet publish -p:PublishTrimmed=true

Debugger

You can bundle the project’s debugger .pdb file with the binary by setting the DebugType property to embedded.

dotnet publish <ARGS> -p:DebugType=embedded

You can also set this in the project’s .csproj file.

<PropertyGroup>
  <DebugType>embedded</DebugType>
</PropertyGroup>

Native Libraries

The IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract is used to make 5.x .NET application to behave the same as a 3.x application. When a 3.x .NET application starts it creates a temporary extraction folder that it runs code out of, where as 5.x applications load that code into memory. This IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract simply makes the 5.x deploy behave the same as the 3.x.