Runners

Cake comes in two different flavors, which require different runners:

Flavor Runner
Cake Scripting Cake .NET Tool
Standard .NET console application Cake Frosting

A console application has the advantage of full IDE support, like IntelliSense, refactoring and debugging, but requires a full .NET project. A scripting approach can be an easier solution for simple build scenarios, as it allows to use a single file.

Feature overview

Runner Minimum required .NET version Supported IntelliSense
Cake .NET Tool .NET 6 [1]
Cake Frosting .NET 6

[1]: Limited support in Visual Studio Code. See IntelliSense in Visual Studio Code

Supported operating systems

The following table shows the supported operating systems for each runner.

Runner Windows macOS Linux
Cake .NET Tool
Cake Frosting

Supported platforms

The following table shows the supported platforms for each runner.

Note that the platform under which a build is running doesn't limit its build capabilities. It's absolutely possible for example to build a .NET Framework application with Cake running on .NET 6.

Runner .NET 8 .NET 7 .NET 6
Cake .NET Tool
Cake Frosting

Supported Build Systems

The following table shows build systems for which Cake provides specific integrations.

Cake can run on any build system, even if not included in this list. For the listed build systems Cake provides out of the box integrations. See Build Systems for details.

Runner AppVeyor Azure Pipelines Bamboo Bitbucket Pipelines Bitrise Continua CI GitHub Actions GitLab CI GoCD Jenkins MyGet TeamCity TravisCI
Cake .NET Tool
Cake Frosting