How to author nuget packages required for a .net application in a Wix Setup? At present, we have 100 projects, each using different sets of nuget packages. And, we are manually adding a component for each assembly required for the application. This is very cumbersome, because each time we update a nuget package, we must update the .wxs file too.
Is there a standard way to automate this process of including nuget packages in wix setup? Or is there a workaround ?
There's a way to do this, you can call the wix harvester (heat) on your project's target directory and it will include everything in there. That command can also take an XSLT filter which ignores certain files if needed. You can call this command as a pre-build event in your setup project, or as a post-build in your actual project.
Here is a guide that shows the details: http://ahordijk.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/automatically-add-references-and-content-to-the-wix-installer/
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I have a project (a PowerShell module) that relies upon a NuGet package, whose assemblies are loaded into my module via the Add-Type cmdlet. I would like to install this package via NuGet instead of manually copying it into the correct folder. This would save me from committing it's binaries to source control. Also: when thinking about CI/CD, I'd hate to have them in my repo.
I know I can curate a packages.config file and use nuget install instead. But this command installs the package together with it's dependencies into a separate folder and therefore the framework will (runtime) not find the required dependencies.
I know I could also provide a script that performs the nuget install and then copies the required .dll files into a single folder. But I would have to deal with the fact that the package might have different versions for different target frameworks and I'd need to handle the compatibility. Or maybe the package has other additional required files that I know nothing about.
So here my question: there has got to be a simpler way to do this? Something less ... circuitous and cumbersome?
Our first step is a MsBuild for our .sln file. We pass in our platform and config and everything is built correctly.
Next we want to NuGet pack all the files for Octopus Deploy to use. In this step we specify all of our .csproj files (not sure why, everything is already built)
The package that is created contains 2 folders, Content which contains all the files needed minus bin and the Lib folder which contains only the projects compiled dlls. It's not including any of the other dlls referenced in the project.
It sounds like it might be easier for you to use Octopack to handle the creation of the NuGet packages to be deployed.
Step 1. Install the Octopack NuGet package into the projects that are your deployable applications.
Install-Package OctoPack
Step 2. Ensure you have a build step before the main compilation that will install any referenced NuGet packages.
Step 3. Install the TeamCity plugin for Octopus deploy from the downloads page and restart the TeamCity server service
Step 4. You'll now see additional options in your MSBuild runner configuration and if you check the following box in your build configurations, it will produce a NuGet package for you which should have everything required for a successful deployment.
As a small tip, I publish the package straight to Octopus by referencing the output package (rather than waiting for it to be attached as an artifact at the end of the build and thus requiring two build configurations)
Hope this helps
If NuGet pack is not packaging your application as you expected from your project file, you have to create a NuGet spec file and specify how things should be packaged. For a web application that is as simple as creating a simple .spec file and putting it into your web application directory, but for other projects that can be a little more complicated. Check out the Nuspec Reference to see how to add your content and dependencies. https://docs.nuget.org/create/nuspec-reference
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.
Nuget.exe only supports managing packages at a file system/configuration level. The powershell commands command the magic that update the .proj files.
With that said, i need the ability to update a csproj file with the latest version of a NuGet package outside of visual studio (automated).
Basically, how do I use Install-Package (or any of the other methods) inside of an external powershell script of my own?
UPDATE:
I would like to ability to add project references outside of VS for the following reason.
My company has a lot of shared libraries that depend on each other in some cases. I am using TFS Nugetter to build and publish nuget packages from TFS. I want to ensure that the developers can't queue a build (package) unless the project can build and run on all the newer versions. This ensures that all the newer versions of the libraries work with all the newer versions of its dependencies. If the build fails, then you need to update your nuget reference in VS and fix the compiler errors/unit tests.
I have been looking at the NuGet source and I think I found an easy way to reuse NuGet source to modify proj files outside of VS (kinda).
System.Type t = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID("VisualStudio.DTE.10.0", true);
var dte = (DTE)System.Activator.CreateInstance(t, true);
dte.Solution.Open(
#"C:\Users\paul.knopf\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\SLNMemory\SLNMemory.sln");
Basically, open an in-memory version of visual studio, run the nuget commands, then save.
In a build step, after GetWorkspace, I would like to run this in-memory vs to update all nuget references to the latest version.
What do you think? It would definitely be slow, but we would be on the same code base and have all the functionality we need.
Automating Visual Studio as you describe is certainly a possibility.
Another way I looked at was using SharpDevelop to install NuGet packages outside of Visual Studio. The NuGet PowerShell cmdlets were modified to accept a solution and you could automate installation, including the use of PowerShell scripts in a NuGet package, from the command line. The code has not been updated so it targets an old version of NuGet but could be updated. Again this is similar to your solution and fairly heavyweight solution.
I'm trying to create a NuGet package from a .csproj. I have successfully compiled the project and the output folder contains all of the necessary files (my assembly and all of its dependencies). However, NuGet only seems to be placing the assembly created by the .csproj into the package and not any of its dependencies. My command line looks like this:
nuget pack MyProject.csproj -Property Configuration=Release
and my resulting .nupkg file only has my assembly in the lib folder. I have successfully gotten NuGet to work for other projects, but it just so happens that this project is referencing the Enterprise Library logging block, but it was NOT retrieved via NuGet. I'm not sure if that could be related to my problem or not.
Any thoughts on why it's not picking up the dependenices?
If you need to keep your nuspec file up-to-date automatically, its really just an XML file (as I'm sure you know) so there are some very nice tools you can use from MSBuild to automate nuspec creation/updates. Out of the box, MSBuild provides a few tasks that can update or transform XML, and I've used MSBuild Community Tasks to customize the initial nuspec. For example, the default nuspec contains a few lines with broilerplate that I don't need, so I use XmlUpdate tasks to delete them.
Although I have not looked into scanning the csproj file for non-nuget references, I think its likely possible with a little research. Here are some links to blog entries describing my experiences with NuGet automation, they may help you get a head start:
Creating Packages with NuGet the MSBuild Way - This article includes some basic NuSpec updates because the package described is not that different from the type of package NuGet already knows how to automate.
Manage Your MEF Parts With Nuget - This article includes some more complex updates to support distributing MEF parts as runtime-only references.
If you plan on doing this alot, don't want to mess with MSBuild, or just want to get back the behavior you liked from the pre-1360 version of ProjectFactory.cs, NuGet supports third-party extension through MEF. You could go into the source control and grab the earlier code that you liked and create a custom command (for example custompack) that provides that behavior. Then you could use it from the command line like so:
nuget custompack MyProject.csproj -Property Configuration=Release
I think this is a really cool aspect of NuGet but I haven't played with it myself yet. Here is an article that explains how to do it:
Extend NuGet Command Line
So even though David mentioned that NuGet is not designed to support this scenario, if the scenario is correct for you then you can go this route to extend NuGet to meet your needs.