Client-side library acquisition in ASP.NET Core with LibMan

By Scott Addie

Library Manager (LibMan) is a lightweight, client-side library acquisition tool. LibMan downloads popular libraries and frameworks from the file system or from a content delivery network (CDN). The supported CDNs include CDNJS, jsDelivr, and unpkg. The selected library files are fetched and placed in the appropriate ___location within the ASP.NET Core project.

LibMan use cases

LibMan offers the following benefits:

• Only the library files you need are downloaded.
• Additional tooling, such as Node.js, npm, and WebPack, isn't necessary to acquire a subset of files in a library.
• Files can be placed in a specific ___location without resorting to build tasks or manual file copying.

LibMan isn't a package management system. If you're already using a package manager, such as npm or yarn, continue doing so. LibMan wasn't developed to replace those tools.

Additional resources

• Use LibMan with ASP.NET Core in Visual Studio
• Use the LibMan CLI with ASP.NET Core
• LibMan GitHub repository