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https://github.com/ModernRonin/ProjectRenamer

Conveniently rename your csproj files
https://github.com/ModernRonin/ProjectRenamer

csharp csproj csproj-tooling dotnet paket rename renameproject utility

Last synced: 23 days ago
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Conveniently rename your csproj files

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README 

        
# renameproject

![CI Status](https://github.com/ModernRonin/ProjectRenamer/actions/workflows/dotnet.yml/badge.svg)

[![NuGet](https://img.shields.io/nuget/v/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer.svg)](https://www.nuget.org/packages/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer/)

[![NuGet](https://img.shields.io/nuget/dt/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer.svg)](https://www.nuget.org/packages/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer)

[![PRs Welcome](https://img.shields.io/badge/PRs-welcome-brightgreen.svg?style=flat-square)](http://makeapullrequest.com) 

## Summary

How often have you felt the need to rename or move a C# (or [VB](#use-with-vb-projects)) project? If you have come here, then you know that the most important existing IDE for C#, Visual Studio,

does not really support this scenario very well.



This tool takes care of this for you, provided your use-case follows a set of fairly common practices:

* you use **git** as a repository and have `git`(the executable) on your PATH

* your `csproj` files have the same name as the folder in which they reside together with accompanying source code

* you don't have more than one solution file (`.sln`) in one directory

* you have **dotnetcore 3.1** or above (**note: as we are approaching the release of net7, I will soon upgrade the tool to net6)

* your solution does not contain nested solution folders - the tool currently has an issue with that and will fail; until I find the time to fix that, the 

workaround is simply to move the nested solution folder to top-level via VS, run the tool, and then move the solution folder back;seeing as this is two 

simple drag-and-drops that only change the solution file, I hope this is acceptable.



## Get it

*renameproject* is intended to be used as a global dotnet tool. 

(You could install it as a local tool, too, but given what it does this does not really make a lot of sense.)



You install it by executing:



```shell

dotnet tool install -g ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer

```



## Update it

If there is a new version out, you can update *renameproject* with



```shell

dotnet tool update --global ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer

```



When I publish a new version, I always post at [my blog](https://modernronin.github.io/) under the [renameproject tag](https://modernronin.github.io/tags/renameproject/), aside from updating this readme here.



### Release History

2.2.1:

* bugfix: all Import Project directives with relative paths will be correctly adjusted now



2.2.0:

* feature: tool can be used on VB projects, too; thanks to [@fsbflavio](https://github.com/fsbflavio) for the PR!

* bugfix: fixed a potential deadlock; thanks to [@fsbflavio](https://github.com/fsbflavio) for the PR!



2.1.5:

* bugfix: tool can be used on *nix platforms now without crashing; thanks to [@pranav-ninja](https://github.com/pranav-ninja) for the PR!



2.1.4:

* bugfix: fixed issue when paths contained whitespace; thanks to [@jakubmaguza](https://github.com/jakubmaguza) for the PR - the first contribution from anyone else :-)



2.1.3:

* bugfix: fixed a bug concerning nested solution folders; thanks to [@Mike-E-angelo](https://github.com/mike-e-angelo) for reporting the bug



2.1.2:

* bugfix: fixed another whitespace related scenario; thanks to [@sejohnson-at-griffis](https://github.com/sejohnson-at-griffis) for reporting the bug



2.1.1:

* bugfix: projects in paths containing whitespace no longer crash the dotnet commands; thanks to [@NicolasRiou](https://github.com/NicolasRiou) for reporting the bug



2.1.0:

* feature: you can move projects to different folders now instead of just renaming them

* feature: you can specify a directory to exclude from project reference updates

* feature: the detected VS solution folder is displayed in review

* feature: the detected git version is displayed in review

* bugfix: when called with unnamed arguments, old project name now is understood to come before new project name (before it was the wrong way round)

* bugfix: VS solution folders containing spaces don't crash the tool anymore



2.0.0: 

* breaking change: instead of asking the user interactively, behavior is now controlled via commandline switches



1.0.1: 

* bugfix: if a project is not in a solution folder, the tools works now, too

* bugfix: if a required tool like git cannot be found, give a proper error message



1.0.0: initial release



## Use it

You use it from the command line, in the directory of your solution:



```shell

renameproject  

```



The project names include neither path nor extension (.csproj). *renameproject* will find your project just by the name, no matter how deeply it might be hidden in your directory structure.

It must be linked into the solution, though.



### Simple rename

Example usage:

```shell

renameproject ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer ModernRonin.RenameProject

```



What will happen:

* the project file will be renamed

* the folder of the project file will be renamed

* renaming is done with `git mv` so it keeps your history intact

* all `` tags in other projects in your solution referencing the project will be adjusted

* if you use [paket](https://github.com/fsprojects/Paket) **as a local dotnet tool** (see [Soft Limitations](#soft-limitations)), `paket install` will be run, unless you specified the flag `--no-paket`

* all changes will be staged in git

* if you specified a flag `--build`, a `dotnet build` will be run just to be totally safe that everything worked well, for very cautious/diligent people :-)

* a commit of the form `Renamed  to ` will be created automatically, unless you specified a flag `--no-commit`



If anything goes wrong, all changes will be discarded.



### Move

Since version 2.1.0, the tool also allows you to move projects. To do this, you prefix the new name with a relative folder. 



Here's an example:

```shell

renameproject ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer src/ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer

```



If you want to move a project from somewhere in a subfolder into the root of the solution, prefix the new name with `./`.



For example, to revert the change from the previous example you'd do:

```shell

renameproject ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer ./ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer --project-extension=.vbproj

```



### Rename and Move combined

You can also move and rename in one operation like

```shell

renameproject ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer src/ModernRonin.RenameProject

```



>However, there is a **caveat**: git interprets this not as rename, but as delete and create and thus you will loose the history of your project file. Thus, I recommend to do such things in two passes.



### Exclude Directory

In some situations, for example if your repository contains a separate solution with separate projects in a subdirectory, you want to exclude a directory completely from being looked at by the project reference update mechanism. In that case, you can specify that directory with the optional `--exclude` argument.



### Use with VB projects

Since version 2.2.0, you can rename Visual Basic projects now, too, thanks to a PR from [@fsbflavio](https://github.com/fsbflavio):



```shell

renameproject ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer ModernRonin.RenameProject --project

```



### Help

For details about available arguments and flags/options and some example calls, you can also use 

```shell

renameproject help

```

to get help about the available flags.



## Limitations

*renameproject* has a few limitations. Some of them are *hard limitations*, meaning they are unlikely to go away, others are *soft limitations*, meaning they exist only because I simply have not gotten round to fix them yet. I  

do not really have a lot of free time to spend on this, but am **totally open to PRs (hint hint)**. 



### Hard Limitations

* Your local repository copy must be clean. This is to ensure that in case we have to discard changes, we don't discard anything you wouldn't want discarded, by accident.

If *renameproject* detects uncommitted changes, added files or the like, it will abort its operation.

* the tool won't adjust your namespaces - just use R# for this.

* I have not tested this with old-style, pre-SDK `csproj` projects and I very likely never will



### Soft Limitations

* you cannot have more than one solution file or the solution file in another location than the current directory - could be turned into an optional command-line argument in the future

* you cannot use this without git - the git-aspects could be made optional via a command-line flag in the future

* you cannot use this with projects of other types than `csproj` or "vbproj"; you can try to use it with for example `fsproj`, but there has been no testing this of any kind

* the detection of whether the local repo is clean might throw false positives in some cases

* you cannot use wildcards, like `renameproject ModernRonin.CommonServices.* ModernRonin.Common.Services.* ` - this would be very handy for the wide-spread convention to have an accompanying ` *.Tests ` project

* you need to manually update the tool with `dotnet tool update -g ModernRonin.ProjectRenamer` and you need to come here to check whether there is a new version (or check nuget)

* if you use paket as a global tool instead of as a local tool, paket support will fail currently - you should really switch to using paket as a local tool, if you can. but on the other hand, in the future *renameproject* might just become smarter about this using a combination of checking whether there is `paket` in the `PATH` and the presence of `dotnet-tools.json` and whether it contains an entry for paket



## License

The [license](./LICENSE) is [Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). In essence this means you are free to use and distribute and change this tool however you see fit, as long as you provide a link to the license

and share any customizations/changes you might perform under the same license.