How to enable migrations in Visual Studio for Mac

This is currently supported on Mac.

First you need to install dotnet-ef

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef

To install a specific version of the tool, use the following command:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef --version 3.1.4

Add the "dotnet-ef" tools directory on the PATH environment variable.

export PATH="$PATH:/Users/'your user folder'/.dotnet/tools"

Open a command line, go to the project folder, and run

dotnet restore

If everything is fine, you should be able to run

dotnet ef

After that you can run commands like:

dotnet ef migrations add initial

dotnet ef database update

PS: Your solution should not be executing when the dotnet ef command line is trying to run!!!

For People who are not convinced, here a demo of succeed!!!

This is not currently supported with Visual Studio for Mac.

There is a NuGet extensions addin that adds a PowerShell console to Visual Studio for Mac however the Entity Framework PowerShell commands are unlikely to work since they are typically Visual Studio specific. Also the PowerShell support is limited since it uses Pash, an open source clone of PowerShell, which is not fully implemented.

If you are using Entity Framework 7 (or what they are calling Entity Framework Core) then you should be able to use the commands with the .NET Core command line.

dotnet ef migrations ...

If you are using Entity Framework 6 then you would need to find another way to call the migrations instead of using PowerShell. Entity Framework 6 has PowerShell commands that are specific to Visual Studio. They were ported to SharpDevelop but involved re-writing them to work with that IDE.

If you are using .NET Core (specifically EF Core), you can install the NuGet PowerShell Core Console in Visual Studio for Mac'.

Just follow the instructions described at:

https://lastexitcode.com/blog/2019/05/05/NuGetPowerShellCoreConsoleVisualStudioForMac8-0/

To run EF on Mac just follow the following.

Open a command line, go to the project folder, and run

dotnet restore

If everything is fine, you should be able to run

dotnet ef

After that you can run commands like:

dotnet ef migrations add initial

dotnet ef database update