DNX, DNVM and DNU

DNX

DNX stands for the .NET Execution Environment and basically is the thing that loads and runs the .NET application including the .NET framework itself. Formally it is a software development kit and runtime environment providing a host process and CLR hosting logic.

DNX eases development given it provides a consistent environment across the supported platforms. It is a command line tool, so starting the same application in OS X, Linux or Windows is done with the same command on each platform.

When selecting a DNX you choose the .NET environment to use from the three available options:

  • The full .NET framework, only supported on Windows, with source code available but not open-source-style contributions.

  • .NET Core, which currently is in development but rapidly evolving. Eventually will be cross-platform but current support for Linux and Mac OS X is very early.

  • Mono, which is truly cross-platform.

A DNX project is a folder with a project.json file, which contains the metadata, dependencies, targeted frameworks and other information (such as authors, license, etc) of your project, which in the end will be a NuGet package. The folder name is the name of the project.

DNVM

DNVM (DNX Version Manager) is a command line utility that manages the different DNX versions installed on a host. It can search and install specific DNX versions, upgrade to latests versions, choose what NuGet package feed to download from, alias the different DNXs installed and more.

Several different DNXs can simultaneously run and coexist in a single host machine, and DNX applications/projects can select a specific DNX as a runtime environment. One way in which a given DNX might be different to another DNX is in the particular .NET framework they use: as we previously commented a DNX can choose between using the .NET Core framework or Mono on either Linux, OS X or Windows; or using the full .NET framework on Windows only.

Another way in which a given DNX may differ from another DNX is the version. Since currently the whole ASP.NET is in development the NuGet feeds are providing the CI (Continuous Integration) builds which are identified by incremental numbers, as well as releases that are more stable, for example the ones tagged with a beta number.

DNU

DNU (DNX Utility) is a command line tool that handles all operations that involve packages in a DNX application. Use DNU to restore the packages and dependencies specified in the project.json file, install specific packages by names from the NuGet feeds, build the DNX project as a NuGet package, list the dependencies of a particular project, and more.

The DNX directory

Following the UNIX standard practice, by default DNVM and DNU download runtimes and packages to the DNX directory:

  • On Windows is %USERPROFILE%\.dnx
  • On Linux and OS X is $HOME/.dnx

The DNX directory contains the following directories:

  • packages: Stores the installed NuGet packages by DNU
  • runtimes: Stores the installed runtimes by DNVM
  • alias: Stores the alias to the different DNX/runtimes. For example to alias the runtime dnx-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-beta4 as default, create a text file called default.txt in the alias subdirectory which has as content a line with the name of the runtime.
C:\>type %USERPROFILE%\.dnx\alias\default.txt
dnx-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-beta4