Microsoft Library Manager (LibMan) is now available in the general release of Visual Studio 2017 as of v15.8. LibMan first previewed earlier this year, and now, after a much-anticipated wait, LibMan is available in the stable release of Visual Studio 2017 bundled as a default component in the ASP.NET and web development workload.
In the announcement about the preview, we showed off the LibMan manifest (libman.json), providers for filesystem and CDNJS, and the menu options for Restore, Clean and Enable Restore-on-Build. Included as part of the release in v15.8 we’ve also added:
– a new dialog for adding library files
– a new library provider (UnPkg)
– the LibMan CLI (cross-platform DotNet global tool)
What is LibMan?
LibMan is a tool that helps to find common client-side library files and add them to your web project. If you need to pull JavaScript or CSS files into your project from libraries like jQuery or bootstrap, you can use LibMan to search various global providers to find and download the files you need.
To learn more about LibMan, refer to the official Microsoft Docs: Client-side library acquisition in ASP.NET Core with LibMan.
What’s new?
New dialog for adding library files
We’ve added tooling inside Visual Studio to add library files to a web project. Inside a web project, you can right-click any folder (or the project root) and select Add–>Client-Side Library…
This will launch the Add Client-Side Library dialog, which provides a convenient interface for browsing the libraries and files available in various providers, as well as setting the target location for files in your project.
New Provider: UnPkg
Along with CDNJS and FileSystem, we’ve built an UnPkg provider. Based on the UnPkg.com website, which sits on top of the npm repo, the UnPkg provider opens access to many more libraries than just those referenced by the CDNJS catalogue.
LibMan CLI available on NuGet
Timed with the release of Visual Studio 2017 v15.8, the LibMan command line interface (CLI) has been developed as a global tool for the DotNet CLI and is now available on NuGet. Look for Microsoft.Web.LibraryManager.Cli
You can install the LibMan CLI with the following command:
> dotnet tool install -g Microsoft.Web.LibraryManager.Cli
The CLI is cross-platform, so you’ll be able to use it anywhere that .NET Core is supported (Windows, Mac, Linux). You can perform a variety of LibMan operations including install, update, and restore, plus local cache management.
To learn more about the LibMan CLI, see the blog post: LibMan CLI Release or refer to the official Microsoft Docs: Use the LibMan command-line interface (CLI) with ASP.NET Core
Related Links
- Microsoft Docs: Using LibMan in Visual Studio
- Microsoft Docs: LibMan CLI docs
- Blog Post: What Happened to Bower?
- Blog Post: Library Manager Preview
- Open-source Repo: GitHub/ASPNET/LibraryManager
- Wiki: LibMan Wiki on GitHub
- Feedback: Issues register on GitHub
Happy coding!
Justin Clareburt, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio
Justin Clareburt is the Web Tools PM on the Visual Studio team. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team his expert knowledge of IDEs and a passion for creating the ultimate development experience.
Follow Justin on Twitter @justcla78