Running evergreen version of a dotnet tool

I’ve been doing quite a few dotnet global tools and had a need for a long-running tool to update itself over time, as updates are pushed to a nuget feed.

This is tricky, since you cannot update a tool that is currently running (dotnet update will try to uninstall the existing version and that will fail since the tool will be running). You could resort to starting an external process with a shell script that would wait for the tool process to exit, then run dotnet update and then launch the tool again, but you would lose the current terminal, for example, and it’s quite ad-hoc and looks messy.

What I really wanted was something as close to dotnet native as possible. Kind of like dotnet watch, but that watches for updates and restarts the tool. So dotnet-evergreen was born.

dotnet evergreen

Let’s say you need to run dotnet-tor and want it to self-update as new versions are published. With dotnet-evergreen this is trivial:

> dotnet evergreen dotnet-tor

If the tool being run is not installed, evergreen will automatically install it on first run, then monitor for changes as long as the tool continues to run. Since no parameters have been provided, changes will be polled from the nuget.org feed. This can be overriden to point to a custom feed. I use the offitial NuGet.Protocol for this.

Here you can see side by side dotnet-echo running via evergreen on Windows and dotnet-tor running on Ubuntu:

Note how the output, even the fancy progress under Ubuntu, is properly displayed.

The tool usage is mostly self explanatory:

dotnet evergreen
  Run an evergreen version of a tool

Usage:
  dotnet evergreen [options] [<tool> [<args>...]]

Arguments:
  <tool>  Package Id of tool to run.
  <args>  Additional arguments and options supported by the tool

Options:
  -s, --source <source>      NuGet feed to check for updates. [default: https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json]
  -i, --interval <interval>  Time interval in seconds for the update checks. [default: 5]
  -q, --quiet                Do not display any informational messages.
  -?, -h, --help             Show help and usage information
  --version                  Show version information

Any options for evergreen come before the tool argument, and all arguments after that are passed as-is to the tool. The tool command doesn’t need to match the package id. Internally, evergreen will lookup the installed tool by package id and execute the actual command provided by it, as shown when you run dotnet tool list -g manually.

When the tool needs to be restarted for updates, I use dotnet-stop, which properly signals Ctrl+C (or SIGINT) to it and waits for termination, so the tool can properly shutdown just as if the user had hit Ctrl+C himself.