dotnet-ef not available after successful restore

We have an interesting issue on one of our build agents regarding dotnet ef cli tool. The error only occurs on one of our agents, however I cannot figure out what’s off.

Running dotnet tool restore in my project directory outputs

Tool 'dotnet-ef' (version '3.1.4') was restored. Available commands: dotnet-ef

However when trying to run dotnet-ef I get an error:

$ dotnet ef
Run "dotnet tool restore" to make the "dotnet-ef" command available.
$ dotnet dotnet-ef
Run "dotnet tool restore" to make the "dotnet-ef" command available.
$ dotnet ef --version
Run "dotnet tool restore" to make the "dotnet-ef" command available.
$ dotnet dotnet-ef --version
Run "dotnet tool restore" to make the "dotnet-ef" command available.
$ dotnet tool run dotnet-ef --version
Run "dotnet tool restore" to make the "dotnet-ef" command available.
Usage: dotnet tool run [options] <COMMAND_NAME> [[--] <additional arguments>...]]

Arguments:
  <COMMAND_NAME>   The command name of the tool to run.

Options:
  -h, --help   Show command line help.
Additional Arguments:
  Arguments passed to the application that is being run.

Further technical details

dotnet-ef version: 3.1.4 dotnet --version: 3.1.300 Target framework: .NET Core 3.1.4 Operating system: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

I’ll attach a verbose output from dotnet tool restore separately.

[dug9000]

We are seeing this same issue on Windows 10 pipeline builds as well. Currently we are doing the following to workaround it:

    if (HasEnvironmentVariable("USERPROFILE") && DirectoryExists(EnvironmentVariable("USERPROFILE") + "/.dotnet/toolResolverCache"))
    {
        DeleteDirectory(EnvironmentVariable("USERPROFILE") + "/.dotnet/toolResolverCache", new DeleteDirectorySettings { Recursive = true, Force = true});
        DotNetCoreTool("tool restore");
    }

But this kind of defeats the purpose of having a toolResolverCache. If the toolResolverCache can’t be done reliably maybe this caching should just be removed from dotnet.

[ajcvickers]

Moving this to the SDK repo since it doesn’t seem specific to EF.