"dotnet: command not found" after installing the Microsoft .NET Core SDK on a Mac

This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Whilst installing the Microsoft .NET Core SDK on my MacBook earlier last week, I found that the instructions on the Microsoft website were not quite complete.

Microsoft tells us to run a few commands to install OpenSSL:

Install Homebrew (it was already on my system)
Then run:

brew update
brew install openssl
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib
ln -s /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/libcrypto.1.0.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/
ln -s /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/libssl.1.0.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/

After this, you should be able to download and install the .NET Core SDK package (version 1.0.4 seems to be the latest version of the SDK at the time of writing, which includes .NET Core 1.0 and 1.1).

Then, in theory, running the dotnet command should be all that’s required but, for me, it resulted in an error:

-bash: dotnet: command not found

The fix, it seems, is to create another symbolic link:

ln -s /usr/local/share/dotnet/dotnet /usr/local/bin/

After that, dotnet ran as expected.

For reference, My MacBook is running MacOS Sierra version 0.12.5 (16F73).