Publish .Net Core App as Portable Executable

Publish .NET Core App As Portable Executable

.NET Core 3.0

.NET Core 3.0 supports it out of the box. It packs all stuff in one .exe file (~68 MB for a basic console app). There is PublishTrimmed=true option that can decrease size to ~28 MB by analyzing static code references and excluding unused framework assemblies from the final build.

To configure single exe build edit your csproj file:

<PropertyGroup>
  <RuntimeIdentifier>win-x64</RuntimeIdentifier>
  <PublishSingleFile>true</PublishSingleFile>
</PropertyGroup>

or on the command line in a folder with csproj file:

dotnet publish -r win-x64 -p:PublishSingleFile=true

For more details see a great answer given by Gopi.

Standalone utils

Warp (thanks to Darien Shannon for mentioning it in the comment) and dotnet CoreRT. Both work with previous versions of .Net Core also

Warp

It is a tool similar to ILMerge for the classic .NET Framework. It is very easy to use. For the basic console app, It can produce .exe ~35 MB without tree shaker and around 10-15 MB with tree shaker.

Dotnet CoreRT

As of Jan 2022 this project is superseded by NativeAOT experiment in dotnet/runtimelab repo. Thanks to @t.j.

For now, you can try to pre-compile the application into a native single-file executable using dotnet CoreRT project. I'm saying "try" because documentation says:

This project is in the early stages of its development.

Nevertheless, it works at least for simple applications. See the sample here.
According to its description, you need to run the following command in the project folder:

dotnet new nuget 

This will add a nuget.config file to your application. Open the file
and in the element under add the following:

<add key="dotnet-core" value="https://dotnet.myget.org/F/dotnet-core/api/v3/index.json" />
<add key="nuget.org" value="https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json" protocolVersion="3" />

Then run this:

dotnet add package Microsoft.DotNet.ILCompiler -v 1.0.0-alpha-* 

Then run this:

dotnet publish -r win-x64 -c release

Once completed, you can find the native executable in the root folder
of your project under /bin/x64//netcoreapp2.0/publish/

Build .NET Core console application to output an EXE

For debugging purposes, you can use the DLL file. You can run it using dotnet ConsoleApp2.dll. If you want to generate an EXE file, you have to generate a self-contained application.

To generate a self-contained application (EXE in Windows), you must specify the target runtime (which is specific to the operating system you target).

Pre-.NET Core 2.0 only: First, add the runtime identifier of the target runtimes in the .csproj file (list of supported RIDs):

<PropertyGroup>
    <RuntimeIdentifiers>win10-x64;ubuntu.16.10-x64</RuntimeIdentifiers>
</PropertyGroup>

The above step is no longer required starting with .NET Core 2.0.

Then, set the desired runtime when you publish your application:

dotnet publish -c Release -r win10-x64
dotnet publish -c Release -r ubuntu.16.10-x64

Publish ONE executable file

At the moment, this is not possible because:

• portable applications still need at least a runtimeconfig.json to tell the host (dotnet / dotnet.exe) which shared runtime to use. Even if you IL-Merge all your managed code into a single dll, this file is still required. The host also expects a deps.json expressing the dependencies of the application.
• self-contained applications rely on building a .dll + .deps.json and copying over content from runtime-specific NuGet packages. This also includes native libraries that are searched for by file name.

The CoreRT project aims to compile a .NET Core application to a single native binary using ahead-of-time compilation but is still in development.

What to copy for a .Net Core console application publish?

Copying just the files from the win-x64 directory was not enough. I needed to copy up the entire publish folder and run the application from that directory, otherwise error messages such as not being able to find a dependency would occur.

Compile a .NET Core application as an EXE file using Visual Studio 2017

Update 2019:

.NET Core 3.0+ projects will now include an executable for the platform you build on by default. This is just a shim executable and your main logic is still inside a .dll file.

But .NET Core 3.0 also introduced single-file deployments so deploying with

dotnet publish -r win-x64 -p:PublishSingleFile=True --self-contained false

will create a single .exe file containing all your dependencies. You can change --self-contained to true to also include the .NET Core Runtime as well so .NET Core does not need to be installed globally on the target machine.

Original

.NET Core applications are supposed to be .dllfiles. OutputType set to Exe in this case means "executable" and does everything necessary to ensure that the output is runnable (entry point from Main() method, .runtimeconfig.json file). The resulting DLL file is meant to be run using:

dotnet yourapp.dll

This DLL file works across all platforms that are supported by the .NET Core runtime (Windows, Linux, and macOS). This is called a "portable" or "framework dependent" deployment.

If you want really a .exe file, consider self-contained deployments. This will create an output that contains its own copy of the .NET Core runtime and an yourapp.exe file - but it also increases the size of the published application and it needs to be updated when new versions of the runtime are released.

Also, the resulting application only works on the operating system published for.

Refer to .NET Core application deployment for more details on the deployment options and how to set them up.

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