ASP.NET MVC 6: What are KRE, KVM, KPM?

ASP.NET vNext comes with a new runtime environment called KRE. Besides KRE that runs ASP.NET vNext applications there are also tools for managing KRE versions and NuGet packages that application uses. This post gives you a quick overview about K-world components and explains shortly how to use them.

K has three components:

1. KRE – K Runtime Environment is the code required to bootstrap and run an ASP.NET vNext application. This includes things like the compilation system, SDK tools, and the native CLR hosts.
2. KVM – K Version Manager is for updating and installing different versions of KRE. KVM is also used to set default KRE version.
3. KPM – K Package Manager manages packages needed by applications to run. Packages in this context are NuGet packages.

To better understand how this K-stuff works take a look at the following image:

Here is the example set of commands to install K, take source from Git repository and run the application after packages are downloaded.

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aspnet/Home/master/kvminstall.ps1'))"
kvm upgrade
git clone https://github.com/aspnet/Home.git
cd Home
cd samples
cd HelloWeb
kpm restore
k web

If everything went normally then you should see some output from simple web server and you can point your browser to URL that you can find from project.json file.