I am looking for practical options to develop and test private nuget packages.
We have a set of "core" code that is delivered securely through an Azure Artifact Feed. We have various "consuming" applications that use the core nuget packages.
As a small-medium team, one person may be developing the core nuget as well as consuming it.
Today we check-in / merge the code for the nuget package. Make sure the Pull request is approved / passes. Then the build updates the Azure Artifact feed.
Then we come back to the "consuming" app and can update the package. Works great if you fix / add the feature the first time. However, slows down productivity when treating this as an iterative development approach.
Looking for simple options for a small team. Random thoughts on options:
Push nuget "alpha" package straight from developer's machine to Azure Artifact feed. Symbol server too?
Do something with an Azure build to allow "feature" branches to publish to Azure Artifact feed somehow?
Push to local nuget feed. Include pdbs so it can be debugged?
Temporarily break the nuget reference directly for local copy of dll(s)?
Re-think using nuget packages as a whole?
Push nuget "alpha" package straight from developer's machine to Azure Artifact feed. Symbol server too?
It depends on whether you need to debug it. If you need do debug this "alpha" package, you have to push the symbol package to the symbol server.
Note: You do not need to push the "alpha" package to the symbol server, just the symbol package.
Do something with an Azure build to allow "feature" branches to
publish to Azure Artifact feed somehow?
There is a task Push NuGet packages, we could use it to publish to Azure Artifact feed during build, no matter which branch it is on. It depends on whether you have enough permissions for the Azure Artifact feed, you can check it from Artifacts->Settings->Feed settings->Permissions:
Push to local nuget feed. Include pdbs so it can be debugged?
No, you also have to include the source code. Check this thread for some more details.
And there is a lightweight solution how to debugged nuget package on local feed on a network share.
Temporarily break the nuget reference directly for local copy of
dll(s)?
Re-think using nuget packages as a whole?
The answer is yes, when we develop the project on the local, use project reference is better than nuget, check my another post for some more details:
Ticket: Project reference VS NuGet.
Hope this helps.
Related
I have a NuGet feed for another source of packages for my project that I'd like to add to the Azure Dev Ops artifacts section as an upstream source, joining the standard NuGet feed. However, despite what the documentation says (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/artifacts/how-to/set-up-upstream-sources?view=azure-devops), the only custom option I see is for "custom NPN registry" with a note saying npm is the only package type that supports custom public upstream sources.
I added my feed anyway but it's not findable in Visual Studio's package manager, though I was able to add something from the standard NuGet feed. Is there a setting I'm missing to enable custom NuGet feeds to be added in, or are the docs incorrect here?
I believe you are misreading the documentation.
Custom public upstream sources are only supported with npm registries.
Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/artifacts/how-to/set-up-upstream-sources?view=azure-devops#enable-upstream-sources-in-an-existing-feed
If you want to use a single feed for everything, you'll have to implement a bit of a hacky workaround.
The workaround, as unfortunate as it may be, would be to use a scheduled pipeline to synchronize the external feed with your Azure DevOps feed.
For debugging I need to push my NuGet packages including Symboles to our self-hosted Azure Devops Server.
Therefore I use the dotnet pack task with the flags --include-symbols and --include-source in my build pipeline. As output I get two files package.1.0.0.nupkg and package.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg.
When I try to push the package.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg package in my release pipeline, I get the feedback:
409 (Conflict - The feed already contains "package.1.0.0".
(DevOps activity ID: 766B8BC7-9AE6-4998-A246-47397236122F)).
I found Publish *.snupkg symbol package to private feed in VSTS on stack. The feedback is that the Azure DevOps Server do not support NuGet Symbols and they suggest to use a symbol server.
Is it a possible workaround to simply rename the package.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg to package.1.0.0.nupkg and push this package to the feed? Is Visual Studio with able to open the debugger inside the sources of these kind of package?
Is there another way to provide NuGet Symbols for debugging on a Azure DevOps Server?
There are multiple questions in your post, let us try to solve them one by one.
Is it a possible workaround to simply rename the
package.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg to package.1.0.0.nupkg and push this
package to the feed?
The answer is no. The error 409 (Conflict - The feed already contains "package.1.0.0" means that you already have one package package.1.0.0.nupkg or package.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg with version 1.0.0 in your feed. So you could not push another package with same version in that feed. Package version in the feed is unique. In order to protect the package from stepping on each other because of the same version of the package.
So, to resolve that error, you need to update the package version, like 1.0.1 (Deleting the old version of the package from the feed will not solve this error).
Is Visual Studio with able to open the debugger inside the sources of
these kind of package?
The short answer is yes. The details will be explained in the next question.
Is there another way to provide NuGet Symbols for debugging on a Azure
DevOps Server?
The answer is yes, we need to configure Visual Studio to enable debugging remote packages. You could refer below Official document and detailed blog:
Debug with symbols in Visual Studio
ASP.NET Core Debugging Nuget Packages with AzureDevOps | VSTS Symbol Server
But when I use nuget install package then only the package.dll is part
of the content which get downloaded from the Azure DevOps Artifacts.
Why is that?
This is expected behavior for installing the package. Because most of the time when we install and use the nuget package, we do not need the debug package, so the installation package will only add the dll we need to the project and will not configure the Symbols package. If we want to debug the package, we have to configure the Symbols package like above links.
The feedback is that the Azure DevOps Server do not support NuGet
Symbols and they suggest to use a symbol server.
The feedback you mentioned in the question is for *.snupkg symbol package not the symbols package. Azure DevOps Server should support publish NuGet Symbols packages, not debug packages, we have to manually configure Visual studio to use the Azure DevOps Server.
BTW, since there are many questions in your post and they are more general, my answer is not very specific. If you have any questions about any specific questions, you are welcome to open a new post with detailed questions.
I want to package and publish a .net standard based code as a nuget package using VSTS build. I have created a private nuget feed (in VSTS Artifacts) to which I would like to publish nuget package along with symbols package.
I tried using dotnet CLI tasks to build and publish but it only publish .nupkg and not *.snupkg to the nuget feed.
I googled alot but I only found articles related to publishing to nuget.org and not to a private feed.
Publish *.snupkg symbol package to private feed in VSTS
You can publish the .snupkg symbol package to NuGet.org, or to any NuGet server that opts into this experience. But azure devops private feed does not have this experience.
You can get the detailed info from this wiki NuGet Package Debugging & Symbols Improvements:
When publishing packages, both the symbols package and the .nupkg will be easily published to NuGet.org, or to any NuGet server that opts into this experience.
Reason:
As we know, when we consume .snupkg in Visual Studio, we add a new symbol server location under Symbol file (.pdb) locations:
But Visual Studio can only parse the symbol file (.pdb) directly rather than the .snupkg package, so we need a NuGet server to help us read the .pdb file from the .snupkg package. Azure devops feed is more inclined to be a shared repository of packages.
So, we have to publish *.snupkg symbol package to NuGet.org, or to any NuGet server that opts into this experience.
If you do not want share your package on the nuget.org, You can host your own NuGet server or you can use a lightweight solution to resolve this issue (You can debug the nuget package with private feed).
Hope this helps.
You may well want to just embed the symbol PDB in the main NuGet package itself. IMO that's the best approach here today - it's much simpler, removing the need for the symbol server at all and works well with all repository types, private VSTS/Azure DevOps feeds public repos. The only downside is that clients have to download modestly bigger NuGet packages even if they don't use the debug info, but that seems minor.
Adding the PDB in the NuGet package is normally just a matter of adding this to your project file:
<AllowedOutputExtensionsInPackageBuildOutputFolder>$(AllowedOutputExtensionsInPackageBuildOutputFolder);.pdb</AllowedOutputExtensionsInPackageBuildOutputFolder>
See NuGet #4142 and Include pdb files into my nuget (nupkg) files.
Azure Artifacts does not currently support .snupkgs but it does have a symbol server to which you can publish if you're building using Azure Pipelines. This doc walks through setting up a pipeline that publishes symbols.
You can publish the snupkg files to Azure DevOps, but at this point, you cannot consume them from with VS to debug. Here is how I did it:
1) setup a "Use .Net Core" task to upgrade the .net sdk to the version that supports this (as below)
2) setup a custom dotnet pack command (as below)
3) push it to Azure using the dotnet push command (as below)
This results in the snupkg being pushed to Azure DevOps Artifacts, thus:
I have set up a feed on azure devops
I now have nuget.config in my solution with the packages sources configured with my feed.
Question
Given that my mobile solution contains projects that will output nuget packages, why are those packages not appearing in my feed?
When building the app in appcenter I was expecting all the dependencies and nugets to appear
in the artifact feed automatically but only 02 did?
do you have to have a pipeline to push packages to the feed?
Can just building a solution be enough for all the dependencies in the solution to be pushed
to the artifact feed? .Hope makes sense
I have looked at all microsoft docs and its' not clear!
Any suggestions how feeds are meant to work apart from pushing them yourself via either nuget push or a pipeline?
The packages don't get published to your feed unless you explicitly publish them to the feed. There's no mechanism that detects that you've created packages and automatically publishes them.
Use the NuGet task with the push option and you can choose the artifact feed to which your packages are published.
I have turned on TeamCity's NuGet Server and I want to push in common packages (i.e. from public sources such as NuGet.org) because the build server cannot see outside our company, so restoring packages on the build server from NuGet.org is not possible.
I cannot see how to push these packages on to our TeamCity server. I've seen various answers suggesting to use a package build still or some other means of publishing from within a build, but this is not appropriate for my use case.
If I try to publish from a command line it complains that it cannot find an API key (where do I get that from?) and it won't allow me to enter my credentials (I assume my team city login would be it) as it tells me "Cannot prompt for input in non-interactive mode." (I didn't set that mode and I can't see how to turn that off).
So, how do I push/publish an adhoc package that I obtained elsewhere into team city?
I believe that the nuget functionality provided by TeamCity is an API added on top of TeamCity's builtin artifact functionality.
There are a number of consequences of that:
When a build configuration is executed that produces any .nupkg files that are marked as artifacts, they will be available on the Teamcity nuget feed.
As with all other artifacts nupkgs published in TeamCity are subject to Teamcity's general artifact retention rules.
Access rules for nuget packages are the same as access to the TeamCity projects.
There is however as far as I know no implementation in the Teamcity Nuget API for pushing packages to it. The general practice for storing original or generated packages is to use a stand alone nuget server or service like a normal file share, a Nuget.Core based server, proget or myget.org.
Update:
If you end up with many packages of your own I've heard people reporting that Teamcity becomes quite slow when the clients are resolving the packages.
Update 2:
The last years I've adopted the notion of separating build artifact packages into the two categories library package and deployment package. A separate package repository can be used for both types but a repository such as the one available in for instance Octopus deploy should only be used for deployment packages.
Update 3:
Microsoft have a page for a number of nuget server options.