Need an option to check for the updates of installed tools similar to that of installed templates update check

[egvijayanand]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Manually checking for updates of each and every installed tool is painful and time-consuming.

So, need an option to check and apply the updates of the installed tools in a single command similar to that of checking and applying the updates of the installed templates using the below commands.

dotnet new --update-check and dotnet new --update-apply

Describe the solution you'd like

Following the same pattern dotnet tool --update-check and dotnet tool --update-apply to install the (latest) version available, if any. Support for --global option is also to be considered here.

At least the update check should be supported at the earliest.

Additional context

Hope the feature requested is self-descriptive and this saves the precious time of redundant work.

[egvijayanand]

Hi @joeloff,

Has any further progress been made on this request?

Regards,
Vijay Anand E G

[egvijayanand]

Hi @joeloff,

Can this be included in the .NET 7 release scope?

It's really a pain to check for updates manually.

Regards,
Vijay Anand E G

[baronfel]

@baronfel to write a mini-spec for this

[baronfel]

Initial Spec

We should pattern this after dotnet list package in terms of the options that are accepted, and this should be a natural extension of the already-existing dotnet tool list and dotnet tool update commands.

The syntax should be:

dotnet tool list [--outdated] [--global]
dotnet tool update [--outdated] [--global]

meaning that

• dotnet tool list should learn the --outdated option to only return tools with newer versions available
• dotnet tool update should learn the --outdated option to update all tools with newer versions
• both options should also learn the --prerelease option to allow updating/comparing against prerelease versions
• all of this should be done taking listed/unlisted versions into account - bulk updating should not accept resolve to/accept unlisted tool versions.

The team doesn't have this on their radar for now, but we of course would love to work with interested community members to make this a reality.