Publish .NET Core App As Portable Executable

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.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As of Jan 2022 this project is superseded by NativeAOT experiment in dotnet/runtimelab repo.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/

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