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