NotMyself / Sample-EFCoreMigrationsCLI

A sample application showing how to wire up EF Core in Console applcation so that the EF CLI tools work.

How to use EFCore Migrations with Console App

This sample shows how to use Entity Framework Core Migrations CLI tools in a .NET Core Console application. This sample is based on the awesome sample app by Brice Lambson that shows how to wire up EFCore Migrations with multi-assembly project.

The Solution

This sample application is contained in a single executable assembly.

Assembly	Description
CLI	Contains the DbContext

Running Commands

To run the commands, CLI should be used as the startup project (-StartupProject in PMC and --startup-project in CLI).

dotnet restore
cd src/CLI
dotnet ef migrations add Init
dotnet ef database update

Points of Interest

There is a simple trick to get this all to work. The EFCore tooling looks for an implementation of IDbContextFactory<TContext> to construct the DbContext instance. If it exists, it will be used and the EF CLI tool will function as expected.

Note that you cannot pass dependencies in to the implementation of IDbContextFactory<TContext>. According to this issue, the EFCore tooling will only consume ServiceCollections wired up in a ASP.NET Core Startup class. It will not look for any other implentation of a service builder.