I messed up my Ubuntu 18.04.2 workstation and now it only boots to CLI.

It doesn't have network capability in cli right now. So I can't even reinstall the stuff I was messing with that crippled it. I bet I could fix it all but it's missing repositories and with no network it can't download them.

So my question is- what would I need to install via apt-get (with no networking) that would networking back alive? Well install and/or what line command(s) to manually run whatever I already have?

What's the basic networking packages (it's ethernet, btw)?

thanks

If you have messed it up that bad better to reinstall, that said all the packages that have been installed on your machine will be in the /var/cache/apt/archives/ directory. If you can figure out which ones you need to install with dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/package.deb. Networking is setup during install by hardware discovery and loading the modules needed for it to work. Some of the time you need non-free hardware blobs to have it initialized, those are in a package you install.

You cannot install via apt-get without network access.

Did you lose wireless and wired both?

1. check your apt history
2. networking can be achieved with command line tools. I suggest you try 'nm-cli' first.