Umbraco Unicore first impressions
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- 4 minutes to read
On Thursday 3rd September, Umbraco HQ announced the first alpha of Unicore, Umbraco v8 running on .NET Core!
What is Unicore?
Unicore is Umbracoās project to get the CMS running on .NET Core. As mentioned in the live stream, the first commits happened in November last year, and they reckon theyāre about half way through the project as a whole.
Why .NET Core?
You might be thinking āwhat the heck is this .NET Core thing I keep hearing about?!ā Core is the future of .NET as a whole. Frameworkāwith a capital F; and what you might traditionally think of as ānormalā .NETāwill no longer be worked on and will go into support around November when Core v5 is shipped. As soon as this happens, Core will become the de-facto standard of .NET, and everything will be renamed to simply⦠wait for it⦠.NET v5!
The main draw of Core being the future of the framework is that it works in many more places. Traditionally if you wanted to write in the C# language you were restricted to only working on Microsoft technologies. Now youāll be able to work on macOS, Linux and much more!
First impressions
Letās try and get this alpha up and running then! If we follow the instructions on the announcement blog post we can see that itās fairly straightforward. Iām running this on a 2017 MacBook Pro running macOS 10.15 Catalina.
We add a custom Nuget feed to be able to pull the prerelease fromā¦
dotnet nuget add source "https://www.myget.org/F/umbracoprereleases/api/v3/index.json" -n "Umbraco Prereleases"
ā¦install the Umbraco dotnet template so we can scaffold a releaseā¦
dotnet new -i Umbraco.Templates::0.5.0-alpha001
ā¦and then we can create a new project! The UmbracoUnicore
is the name of the Visual Studio solution that will be created, as well as the folder weāre going to make.
dotnet new umbraco -n UmbracoUnicore
Once thatās done, we can move into the folder the dotnet
installer created, build and then run.
cd UmbracoUnicore
dotnet build
dotnet run
Once this is done, weāre up and running! The console currently doesnāt tell you anything is runningāas mentioned in the blog postāso we can just go to http://localhost:5000
. Hereās what we get!

As with every Umbraco installation, you go through and enter your details and SQL server details. Once installed, youāll need to type dotnet run
again into your terminal. This is a known issue listed on the announcement blog post. Refresh your browser and youāll be able to see the login screen, and then weāre inside Umbraco!

Now we can have a look around the backoffice. At a glance, everything seems QUICK. Iām so impressed that this is Umbraco running natively on macOS! I tried creating a few doctypes, and also importing some from an 8.6 site thatās in production, and everything appears to work as intended.

At the moment, there is no front end to the site so youāre restricted mostly to what can be done in the backoffice, and Iām incredibly excited for this future for Umbraco! As HQ said on the live stream, they need people to be able to go to the edges of Umbraco and try everything; all possible edge cases and functionality.

Whatās next?
Test it, test it, test it! Try and do everything you would normally do with the CMS. Break it. Raise bugs in GitHub. Pick up some of the up for grabs issues. Iāve worked with Umbraco for nearly 10 years and Iāve never actually committed anything to core, but I think now could be the time for me! š
There are going to be more alphas released in the coming months to keep testing, and then a stable beta once views are accessible and can be worked on.
umbraCoffee also did a great video deep dive into this as well (in which they also kindly mentioned my previous blog post!)
What an exciting time to be working with .NET!