Fixing error in .NET Core tool installation

Last week I was testing some .NET tooling and wanted to install a tool locally instead of globally. To do so you run this command:

dotnet tool install dotnet-stryker

While running (either locally or in an Azure DevOps task) I got this error message:

[command]"C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe" tool install dotnet-stryker
Cannot find any manifests file. Searched:
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\s\StrykerDemo.UnitTests\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\s\StrykerDemo.UnitTests\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\s\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\s\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\7\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\_work\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\TFSAgent\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\Apps\dotnet-tools.json
C:\.config\dotnet-tools.json
C:\dotnet-tools.json

Searching around on the internet for the file it is searched (throughout the whole folder tree), I found that you need to run this command to create a local manifest:

dotnet new tool-manifest

Yet doing so resulted in the following error message and the default prompt to choose a template to run.

No templates matched the input template name

Apparently the command to generate the manifest wasn’t available on my machine. Further searching lead to this GitHub issue that pointed out this was recently added in .NET Core 3.0, so it seemed that it could be coming from an old preview version?

Checking the runtimes I had installed with dotnet --list-runtimes, pointed out that I was indeed running on on older version of the preview for .NET Core 3.0.

Microsoft.NETCore.App 2.2.4 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 3.0.0-preview-27113-06 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App]
Microsoft.NETCore.App 3.0.0-preview-27114-01 [C:\Program Files\dotnet\shared\Microsoft.NETCore.App]

Downloading and installing the latest preview (3.0.0-preview8-28405-07 at the time of writing) fixed the issue and I could carry on with figuring out my other steps that I was actually working on 😄.