.NET Client-Side Libraries

In this post, I introduced (to me) a new method of installing client-side JavaScript libraries for a .NET Web Application.

In this follow-up, I'm going to cover how this can be used in conjunction with npm in order to simply move the files into the correct location. Note that this is a new tool in Visual Studio, and you'll need VS 15.8.0 or higher for it to work. Let's start by creating an empty .NET Core web app. Once you've done so, you're app probably looks like this:

Now you'll need to launch a bash or PowerShell console:

npm init
npm install jquery

Refresh your project and show all files:

As you can see, you now have a node_modules directory. The problem is that the files need to be under wwwroot. Obviously, you could copy it, but let's try the client side manager:

In the resultant dialog, select File System; navigate to the jQuery directory and select the files that you want:

Now refresh the project again and let's see what we have:

This actually translates to a JSON file; libman.json looks like this:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "defaultProvider": "filesystem",
  "libraries": [
    {
      "library": "node_modules\\jquery\\dist\\",
      "destination": "wwwroot/lib/dist/",
      "files": [
        "jquery.min.js"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Okay, so that's very nice; but now that we have a system that will copy files from wherever into wherever (the rule is that you have to go deeper in the files structure, so you couldn't copy that file back again) then we, presumably, could use this for other things. For example, have you ever had a file (an image or something) that you need to include in your project:

Obviously, c:\tmp above could just as easily be \\shareddrive\images.

To be clear, I'm unsure whether this is abusing the system, or it was meant for this exact thing. It is possible that this type of usage may become unsupported in the future (so you've been warned).