Question on dotnet uninstall

I think I have a misunderstanding on how -u|-uninstall works (or perhaps there’s a list refresh that I’m missing for an uninstalled template).

For testing purposes I created a few file system test templates, such as this one for Giraffe4.Template/giraffe4 …

{
  "identity": "Giraffe4.Template",
  "author": "guardrex",
  "classifications": [ "Web", "Giraffe", "blah" ],
  "name": "Giraffe Web App4",
  "tags": {
    "language": "F#"
  },
  "shortName": "giraffe4",
  "sourceName": "_AppName"
}

Install works fine …

dotnet new -i c:\template4

However, uninstall doesn’t want to remove the template. I’ve tried the following two commands …

dotnet new -u Giraffe4.Template
dotnet new -u giraffe4

… but the template persists in the list …

dotnet --info:

.NET Command Line Tools (2.0.0-preview2-006349)

Product Information:
 Version:            2.0.0-preview2-006349
 Commit SHA-1 hash:  30a0bc3028

Runtime Environment:
 OS Name:     Windows
 OS Version:  10.0.15063
 OS Platform: Windows
 RID:         win10-x64
 Base Path:   C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\2.0.0-preview2-006349\

Microsoft .NET Core Shared Framework Host
  Version  : 2.0.0-preview2-25406-03
  Build    : baa69770c40ce13dcb1a8979b288be8cb23f9c7b

[guardrex]

@seancpeters I had to delete my last message, because I was still in the process of wrapping my brain around it: It turns out that one installs from a nupkg on disk (locally) (never from a nuspec) but then uninstalls by just providing the package name as you said earlier.

So if the user installs with …

dotnet new -i C:\Users\<USER>\GarciaSoftware.ConsoleTemplate.CSharp.1.0.0.nupkg

they uninstall with …

dotnet new -u GarciaSoftware.ConsoleTemplate.CSharp.1.0.0

Going back to an earlier post, I think it would be far simpler if uninstall was merely based on giving the shortName to the command …

dotnet new -u garciaconsole

… and let the ✨ .NET magic ✨ figure out where/what to uninstall, even if it only meant delisting the template (i.e., when the template itself is no longer on disk or a template at nuget.org doesn’t exist/can’t be found).

I think that I have what I need to get the 1st draft of this topic out, which relies heavily on the Wiki and @sayedihashimi’s blog post to cover the deeper/finer points. Is it ok if I ping you on the PR to take a 👀 look at it?

[seancpeters]

Hi @GuardRex, Uninstall is currently driven by the location the template was installed from. Since giraffe4 was installed using: dotnet new -i c:\template4 you’ll be able to uninstall it using the same path: dotnet new -u c:\template4

Please let us know if that works for you.