Visual Studio 2019 Re-Downloads Azure Function CLI Tools

A little late to respond, but I just recently ran into this issue and it was seriously slowing down my debugging. I had tried downloading the Azure Functions Core tools via npm as recommended by the Azure Functions GitHub page but to no avail.

Thanks to another stack overflow question, I went digging into where Visual Studio keeps locally installed versions of the Azure Functions Tools:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases

The most recent version (for me it was 2.46.0), was empty. On a whim, I copied over the contents of the previous version into the empty folder and updated the manifest.json inside to point at the new folder.

I updated the following properties.

This fixed the issue immediately for me, but I still don't know why this folder was empty in the first place, or why letting Visual Studio download the tools didn't persist them correctly.

Either way, I just thought I'd share in case anyone else was running into the same thing.

@necampanini's answer is right.

And I will provide more details as below:

There is a feed file feed.json (or feed-v3.json) in %LocalAppData%\AzureFunctionsTools. Check the subfolder hierarchy for the latest version of this tool (e.g. for me it's v3.4.1) and create a corresponding subfolder (e.g. %LocalAppData%\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases\3.4.1).

Get the URL from the feed file and download the CLI zip file Azure.Functions.Cli.min.win-<platform>.<version>.zip. Extract it into %LocalAppData%\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases\<version>\cli.

Get the URLs for these two NuGet packages from the feed file:

1. itemTemplates
2. projectTemplates

Download the packages and save them in %LocalAppData%\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases\<version>\templates. Rename the files:

1. microsoft.azure.webjobs.itemtemplates.<version>.nupkg becomes Azure.Functions.Templates.1.0.0.nupkg
2. microsoft.azure.webjobs.projecttemplates.<version>.nupkg becomes Microsoft.AzureFunctions.ProjectTemplates.1.0.0.nupkg

Last, copy manifest.json from the older version folder into %LocalAppData%\AzureFunctionsTools\Releases\<version>, and then edit this file to reference the new version.

Here's a screenshot:

Both @necampanini and @heavenwing answers helped me in resolving my issue with VS 2019 v16.7.3.

I think it's having it blank with the latest func CLI tools because VS will try to load the latest version of the tool which in my case 3.12.0. I notice that 3.12.0 is preview. Then I thought that maybe because my VS 2019 is configured to use the preview SDK - which is why it tries to locate the latest preview of the tool. So after I manually added the appropriate folders cli and templates, and run Visual Studio again, it's now using the 3.12.0 and is able to locate the files for 3.12.0. I observe that if it is unable to locate the latest cli, it will use the next version which in my case is 3.6.0.