How to get appsettings from project root to IDesignTimeDbContextFactory implementation in ASP.NET Core 2.0 and EF Core 2.0

I am building an application in ASP.NET Core 2.0 and I am having problems with EntityFramework Migrations.

I have my DbContext in a separate project (SolutionName\ProjectNamePrefix.Data) and therefore I created an implementation for the IDesignTimeDbContextFactory interface.

I wanted to use different connection strings for different environments and I need appsettings.json for that.

So after a quick search I found that I can create a new IConfigurationRoot object inside the CreateDbContext function as shown here: https://codingblast.com/entityframework-core-idesigntimedbcontextfactory/

I added that and then for testing, tried to run dotnet ef migrations list -c MyContext from the Data project root folder.

Then I got the following error:

The configuration file 'appsettings.json' was not found and is not optional. The physical path is 'C:\dev\*SolutionName*\*ProjectNamePrefix*.Data\bin\Debug\netcoreapp2.0\appsettings.json'.

So, basically, I tried 3 options for getting the correct root path:

• Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
• env.ContentRootPath; (IHostingEnvironment object, I found a way to get it here: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/issues/2194)
• AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;

and all of them returned the same ..\bin\debug\netcoreapp2.0\ path. When I run the Data project from VS, then the two first options give me the correct project root folder.

Is there a way to get the correct project content root folder?

Because when I added --verbose to the EF command, it logged out a row:

Using content root 'C:\dev\FitsMeIdentity\FitsMeIdentity.Data\'.

So I understand that EF somehow knows the project root but all the options mentioned above return the path for the already built application.

The only option I found that works is that I change Copy output to root folder to Copy always but found from here: https://www.benday.com/2017/02/17/ef-core-migrations-without-hard-coding-a-connection-string-using-idbcontextfactory/ that it's not a good idea.

At first I even thought about creating a Constructor for the IDesignTimeDbContextFactory implementation which gets IOptions as a parameter but that didn't work, had the same problem as explained here: Injecting Env Conn String into .NET Core 2.0 w/EF Core DbContext in different class lib than Startup prj & implementing IDesignTimeDbContextFactory