In order to have dependency injection in .NET Core consol applications you will need to install the package

Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection

Before we get into the bootstrapping the console application, lets create a few services. The first service is an email service with a single method.

public interface IEmailService 
{
    Task SendMailAsync(string from, string to, string subject, string body);
}

public class EmailService : IEmailService 
{
    public Task SendMailAsync(string from, string to, string subject, string body) 
    {
        // implement details of sending mail here...
    }
}

The second service is for running our application, it takes IEmailService as a dependency in the constructor.

public interface IAppService 
{
     Task RunAsync();
}

public class AppService : IAppService
{
    public AppService(IEmailService emailService) 
    {
        _emailService = emailService;
    }

    IEmailService _emailService;

    public Task Run()
    {
        // application logic goes here
        // send an email when done
    } 
}

Now that we have some depenencies, let's use them. The code below will do four things

  1. Create a ServiceCollection instance
  2. Configure the services
  3. Create a ServiceProvider that can be used to resolve dependencies
  4. Resolve and use one of our services
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

namespace ConsoleDependencyInjection
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {            
            // configure services
            var services = new ServiceCollection()
                .AddTransient<IAppService, AppService>()
                .AddTransient<IEmailService, EmailService>();
           
            // create a service provider from the service collection
            var serviceProvider = services.BuildServiceProvider();

            // resolve the dependency graph
            var appService = serviceProvider.GetService<IAppService>();
           
            // run the application
            appService.RunAsync().Wait();
        }
    }    
}

The first step was creating the service collection.

var services = new ServiceCollection();

The service collection has extension methods for configuring various service types. It also has the AddTransient, plus others, for configuring your own services quickly.

This should be familiar territory for anyone who has used the ConfigureServices method of a .NET MVC Core application.

Once services are configured, build a IServiceProvider so that you can resolve your application code and execute it. The IServiceProvider has GetService and GetRequiredService method that allow you to retrieve your service. The latter will throw an exception if the service cannot be resolved.

That's all there is to it!