In the project I've been using some custom NuGet sources. Apparently some of them are no longer available but I do have the newer (and only newer) versions of the packages on the other (still working) server. Is there a way to restore the packages directly to the newest versions without manually replacing all the references in the .csproj and packages.config files?
I've tried running Updade-Package -Reinstall but I only get the following error message:
Some NuGet packages are missing from the solution. The packages need to be restored in order to build the dependency graph. Restore the packages before performing any operations.
If some packages you use (and still want to use) are no longer available, I suggest you to make a backup of them.
Find the Nuget cache on your server. On Windows this is located at
%userprofile%.nuget\packages
Spot the packages (and version) you want to backup and copy the .nupkg files in their respective folders.
Then you have two choices:
Create a private Nuget feed
Create a local Nuget feed on your development machine
The 1st option has the advantage to be a single source that can be used on any machine you want (development machine, build server...etc) but you will have more set-up, especially for the authentication/authorization (because it's a private feed)
For the 2nd option: Simply create a C:/Nuget folder and put any .nupkg you want.
Then in Visual Studio go to:
Tools -> Nuget Package Manager -> Package Manager Settings -> Package Sources
Click on the green + button to add a new source, simply give it the name Local and browse to your C:/Nuget to set the source.
From now on when you want to restore your Nuget packages, Visual Studio will first look into the nuget.org feed and if it doesn't find the referenced packages, will then look into your Local feed and cache the installed package to the %userprofile%.nuget\packages of your machine.
I hope that answer to your question, I was not quite sure about what you asked and your knowledge about Nuget.
UPDATE:
I think I understand your question better now.
First of all, I think your misunderstand the Update-Package -Reinstall command. It will reinstall the packages with the SAME version as already referenced but simply reinstalling them. It's a useful command for example when you change the target framework of your project. Then you can reinstall the same versions of the packages and they will retarget this .NET Framework version.
So if a nuget restore isn't working then Update-Package -Reinstall will obviously fail too.
With Nuget, when something isn't working, you shouldn't insist but instead, find the tweak that will make it working again. I can't count how many times I went to the different caches to delete some cached packages.
I think you should try to use nuget restore and see what packages are causing issues, then uninstall these packages (this will just remove the reference from the .csproj and packages.config if they aren't installed in the project yet), then you can finally install the newest version of these packages.
Related
I have a Visual Studio, C# solution with several projects. Some of those point to older versions of some packages. my local nuget repo has more current, stable versions. e.g.
What I want to do is update all those old 3.0.246-alpha references to the latest stable version, 3.1.0
What is the best way to do that?
Output window after clicking Install:
errors at top of screen:
This is what I want to fix. There is no version 3.0.246 of that module, so I want Nuget to overide it with latest stable version, 3.1
Due to the limitation, I post this as an answer, but may include some comments.(Sorry for that)
As I searched online(nuget.org), I found no packages called TBSM.*, perhaps they were created by yourself/your company… and just used(saved) locally?
From the error message, it reported that the NuGet package was not found on source XXXXX, so did you perform some operations to remove the old version of the NuGet packages? (Maybe also removed the NuGet cache files?)
I did some tests:
Since I don’t know the specific structures of your projects/NuGet Package, I just created two NuGet packages for test locally with same names(ID) and different versions, and then added the package source path to the settings, and installed the first NuGet package into one project, after that deleted this NuGet package and the cache files. Then tried to Update it, NuGet Package manager could still update it to the latest version successfully, even if I uncheck these options: Allow NuGet to download missing packages and Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio from VS > Tools > Options > NuGet Package Manager > General.
Of course, I may not remove all of the NuGet packages’ cache files, or the issue is cause by the specific NuGet packages’ structures(cause I used two NuGet packages, but yours maybe used the same one with something updated)…
What I suggest:
1). If it is possible, you can have a try Uninstall and then Install the relates version.(remember to make a backup before this)
2). Try to select this two options in VS(Tools > Options > NuGet Package Manager > General), “Allow NuGet to download missing packages” and “Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio”, and then click Clear All NuGet Cache(s) button. Make sure you have added the right path source from VS > Tools > Options > NuGet Package Manager > Package Sources and try to install/update the NuGet packages again.(Generally, clear cache will not cause errors, but please remember to make a backup before clearing cache)
I see that the folder %HOMEPATH%\.nuget\packages has many nuget package downloads.
What's this folder for? Is it so that every time I download any NuGet package on my machine using the PowerShell or the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio, the package is first cached in this location? That seems like the only plausible answer but I'd like to confirm.
When do packages get added to this folder and who adds them?
It is just the nuget cache, so it does not have to download the same packages over and over again.
It is managed by Nuget itself. If you find it gets too big (and it does), there is nothing wrong with deleting it.
I recently migrated all my Visual Studio 2013 projects to Visual Studio 2015 and followed the steps documented in this article by Nuget to make sure that automatic package restore is still working, in short
I deleted the Nuget.exe and Nuget.target files from source control and disk
I updated all project files and deleted the sections related to Nuget
I'm experiencing a problem when I'm updating Nuget packages, it is not updating the project references to point to the newest dll versions. I can see that the newest packages was installed though. This problem is also not related to specific packages.
Has anyone else experienced a problem like this?
NuGet package restore does not modify the project files. It just downloads and extracts the NuGet packages to the packages directory.
If you are trying to edit the packages.config file and then have the project's updated you would have to use the Package Manager Console and run:
Update-Package -reinstall
Which will uninstall and install the packages again and update the project's references.
We realized that some of our junior developers only installed the required Nuget packages for ONE project in the solution, they then added references to the required dll's for all other projects by browsing to the physical location of the dll's on disk. This obviously caused the problem because only ONE of the projects in the solution contained entries for Nuget packages in it's packages.config file while the remaining projects in the solution contained none.
When all packages were updated using the Update-Package command only the ONE project containing entries in it's packages.config file were updated with the correct project references.
Even though this is not a Nuget bug and rather a problem caused by inexperience, I logged an issue with Nuget to see if they can improve the software to prevent these types of problems.
So I recently had a very similar issue as well, unfortunately uninstalling and reinstalling did not work. Hopefully this helps anyone else as it was very frustrating.
Steps:
go to or launch the quick launch feature.
type package manager
select "tools->Nuget PackageManager-> Package Manager Settings"
In the options window that pops up. click "Clear All Nuget Cache(s)"
Right click solution and select Restore Nuget Packages.
Hope this helps.
I was facing an issue with NuGet package of Newtonsoft.Json as shown below:
I tried all possible solutions but none of the below mentioned ones worked:
Cleaning solution
Rebuilding solution
Clearing NuGet package cache
Finally I realized it had something to do with .NET Framework version targeted by my C# project. There was some mismatch it seems. The moment I upgraded the .NET Framework version of my project to latest, the Newtonsoft.Json package dependency and its reference came alive instantly.
Something I just noticed, and I'm not sure if this will help you or anyone else reading this, but this issue literally wracked my brain. The problem was that I was installing packages that I had created myself using NuGet Package Explorer on Windows.
It turned out that, I believe after updating NuGet Package Explorer, it was no longer putting DLLs that I included into the lib folder. Once I started manually adding the lib folder back into the package within Package Explorer, and then uploading to NuGet and reinstalling in the consuming project, that the reference would once again start to appear.
I'm not sure what caused this behavior - it could have been my own fault, but I literally just now figured this out - and consequently have to go back and re-do a whole bunch of NuGet package goodness that I've done over the past month. OUCH.
Hope this saves someone at least an ounce of pain.
None of the above worked for me.
What did work, was to edit the project file directly and delete the existing reference. When I reloaded the project, the package then showed up in references as a Nuget package.
I happened to come across the same problem. i tried all the possible solution but found the solution - just open the .proj file in an text editor and check the package Version and the HintPath in the Reference tag. Sometime there is an mismatch correct it then Visual studio will recognize. I hope everyone can save lot of time. Here is an sample to refer
<Reference Include="nunit.framework, Version=3.4.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=2638cd05610744eb">
<HintPath>..\packages\NUnit.3.4.1\lib\net45\nunit.framework.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>
Migrating to PackageReferences worked for me for the projects that allowed it. My Asp.Net project could not be migrated, so I resorted to manually adding the references to the .csproj file
I setup an internal NuGet server to host internal dll packages. The setup went smoothly. The spec and nupkg were created successfully. However, when I launch a test project and attempt to install it from Manage NuGet Packages it fails.
The internal package shows up under Manage NuGet Packages with an install button. I hit install but it does nothing. I check my references folder and saw nothing added.
If I check the Manage NuGet Packages at solution level, it has a green check mark indicate that it's installed but doesn't give me a Manage option to see which project it was installed to.
My issue is somewhat similar to this post below. The only difference is that I don't have sub folders for my library. I just have 1 dll and I'm putting the nupkg file directly under the Packages folder.
NuGet package fails to install
I'm not sure what I did wrong. Any suggestions?
Thanks to #MattWard for mentioned that the package got installed at the solution level. I went back to the official documentation here: https://docs.nuget.org/create/creating-and-publishing-a-package to review the differences with creating solution level package vs project level package and most important of all is the nuget naming convention when creating packages (the lib, content, etc. folder). I re-package my dll again with the naming convention and it works!
I'm trying to use nuget.exe outside of Visual Studio as part of our build infrastructure. The idea is that the various build tools are fetched by a bootstrapper script that initializes a working copy. The bootstrapper does this by using a file that specifies the required tools and their version.
Broken approach 1 - use manually edited packages.config
At first, it seemed like a good idea to keep a manually edited packages.config file and use nuget restore to install them during bootstrapping. However, this does not work for tools that have dependencies, unless I list every single dependency in the packages.config as well, a much to arduous approach to be feasible, because I found no easy way to recursively find all dependencies of a package.
See also using nuget.exe commandline to install dependency .
Broken approach 2 - use nuget install to update packages.config
The second idea was then to use nuget install to install the packages, and let that command update the packages.config, very similar to the Install-Package cmdlet in the package manager console. But, surprisingly, nuget install does not support this! It either takes a packages.config or a package ID as parameter, but I found no way to update the packages.config with the new package and its dependencies.
This problem can also be found in another (two year old) SO question, see nuget.exe install not updating packages.config (or .csproj)?.
Is there a working (and non-hacky) approach at all?
This must be a problem that many people face when using nuget outside of VS, so what is the best approach in that case?
Of course, I could just parse the packages.config and emit a nuget install for each package, but I really don't want to re-invent the dependency management part of nuget, this is what I'm using nuget for in the first place. So I'm left with the feeling that either an -WithDependencies switch on nuget restore or an -UpdatePackagesConfig switch on nuget install is missing...
Note that there are other SO questions regarding the broken approaches described above. What I'd like to know it what the best approach is to solve the root problem, i.e. manage packages with dependencies outside of VS.
nuget install does not currently make changes to the project file.
nuget install can be used to either restore the NuGet packages listed in a packages.config file or download and extract them.
If you do not need the project being modified then your solution of reading the packages in the packages.config file and calling nuget install seems like a reasonable approach.
If you need the project to be modified then you could look at one of the following:
Ripple - a command line tool that adds extra features to NuGet. It has a ripple install command line which is similar to nuget install but it also updates the project file. It has a lot of other features for supporting build servers so this might be a good fit.
NuGet packages outside of Visual Studio with SharpDevelop - this was an experiment I put together to see whether full NuGet support could be achieved, including PowerShell scripts, from the command line without using Visual Studio. It uses PowerShell and quite a bit of SharpDevelop.
Customise NuGet.exe to do what you need. nuget update, for example, does modify the project file, at least for file references, but will not run PowerShell scripts. So you could take the NuGet.exe source code and extend it.
Of the above only 3) would give you exactly what you need. The other two would require a bit of work to read the packages from the packages.config file or some other list and then install them.
See my answer to Why does the nuget command line tool not follow dependencies?
nuget install My.Package.Id will follow dependencies. However, if you want to install multiple packages, you will need to create a batch file with a separate nuget install command for each package. These are top-level packages. You don't need to "install" the dependencies, as they will get downloaded automatically.
If you ultimately want a packages.config file, I imagine you can generate one by enumerating all the packages that were downloaded. However, you would have to take care not to include multiple versions of the same package.
I believe that how nuget 3 works with project.json files may do what you are looking for. Essentially my understanding is that the unit of dependency becomes the package and not necessarily individual assemblies. From what I recall, the idea is the have only one place to manage these types of package references which the project (IDE/Editor), package manager, and other command line tools can use.
What I don't understand and feel somewhat frustrated about is that it appears that the project.json concept is being canceled. I don't know if plans are to reintroduce it at anytime in the future. In the mean time I keep on hearing updated info on tooling that takes advantage of project.json such as nuget so where you can actually rely on this is something that is unclear to me at this point.