Is there a way to make a console application run using only a single file in .NET Core?

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Update 2018: .NET Core 3.0 aims to enable a new scenario: packing the .NET Core runtime and all application dependencies into a single executable.

At the moment, there are no fail-safe methods to create a single executable file. Since there are a lot of type-forwarding dll files involved, even ILMerge and similar tools might not produce correct results (though this might improve, the problem is that those scenarios haven’t undergone extensive testing, esp. in production applications)

There are currently two ways to deploy a .NET Core application:

  • As a “portable application”https://stackoverflow.com/”framework-dependent application”, requiring a dotnet executable and installed framework on the target machine. Here, the XYZ.runtimeconfig.json is used to determine the framework version to use and also specifies runtime parameters. This deployment model allows running the same code on various platforms (windows, linux, mac)
  • As a “self-contained application”: Here the entire runtime is included in the published output and an executable is generated (e.g. yourapp.exe). This output is specific to a platform (set via a runtime identifier) and can only be run on the targeted operating system. However, the produced executable is only a small shim that boots the runtime and loads the app’s main dll file. This also allows an XYZ.runtimeconfig.json to set additional runtime properties like garbage collection settings.(think of it as a “new” app.config file)

In the future, the CoreRT runtime – which is still under development at the time of writing – aims to allow creating a single pre-compiled native executable that is specific to a runtime and does not require any other files.

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