List all Transitive Dependencies in your .Net Core Project

Sometimes you need to find out what packages a .Net Core project or solution depends on quickly and whilst you can find this information in the Visual Studio IDE or by opening the project files individually and reading them, there is a quick and easy way using the “dotnet list package” command. What’s more you can also list the packages that your dependencies also have dependencies on, which is really useful for tracking down what part of your solution has a requirement on a specific package.

dotnet list package

This outputs all NuGet package references for a specific project or a solution (which you can specify in the command parameters or just let dotnet find the nearest solution or project file in the current directory structure). Example below:

Project 'WebApplication1' has the following package references
   [net6.0]: 
   Top-level Package                                Requested   Resolved
   > Azure.Storage.Blobs                            12.14.1     12.14.1 
   > Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework      2.2.3       2.2.3 

To see which packages your project relies on and also which packages they in turn rely on then run the command with the --include-transitive flag.

dotnet list package –include-transitive

This outputs the full list of packages and their dependencies, like so:

Project 'WebApplication1' has the following package references
   [net6.0]: 
   Top-level Package                                Requested   Resolved
   > Azure.Storage.Blobs                            12.14.1     12.14.1 
   > Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework      2.2.3       2.2.3   

   Transitive Package                         Resolved
   > Azure.Core                               1.25.0  
   > Azure.Storage.Common                     12.13.0 
   > EntityFramework                          6.1.0   
   > Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core           2.2.3   
   > Microsoft.Bcl.AsyncInterfaces            1.1.1   
   > System.Diagnostics.DiagnosticSource      4.6.0   
   > System.IO.Hashing                        6.0.0   
   > System.Memory.Data                       1.0.2   
   > System.Numerics.Vectors                  4.5.0   
   > System.Text.Encodings.Web                4.7.2   
   > System.Text.Json                         4.7.2   
   > System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions        4.5.4

I found this useful this week when a large solution’s build pipeline was erroring due to a missing dependency but it wasn’t clear which project needed it.

For more info on the dotnet package command see the Microsoft docs here.