Nuget package restore is not working on TFS build server - nuget

I followed this blog post and I expected Nuget to just work. It obviously has not. I get errors on all of my third party dll's that I expect NuGet to update automatically:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications\
Microsoft.WebApplication.targets (182): Could not copy the file "bin\AutoMapper.dll"
because it was not found.
I have set everything up correctly and I have ensured that the solution has Package restore enabled. If I delete a package locally and build, NuGet restores that package for me.
I am not sure why it is not fuctioning on the build server though.
Any Suggestions?

Try to add NugetRestore Activity to the TFS workfolw
Note:
For Team Foundation Build 2013 on-premises and Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Team Foundation Service), the default Build Process Templates already implement the NuGet Package Restore workflow without any special configuration.

I came across a similar error for log4net nuget package and I solved it in a different way. May be this will be useful to someone some day.
The error from TFS Team Build 2015
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\WebApplications\
Microsoft.WebApplication.targets (182): Could not copy the file "bin\Log4net.dll"
because it was not found.
Cause
The path to the nuget package in the .csproj file for referencing the package in the project cannot be found
Resolution
Edit the .csproj file of the project that has the error.
Look for the node ItemGroupin the .csproj file
You will see the HintPath pointing to a folder, most like the folder contain the name of solution as where it will file the DLL.
Replace the HintPath with <HintPath>..\..\Assemblies\3rd party\log4net\1.2.10.0\2.0\log4net.dll</HintPath>
You nuget package library may not be log4net but a different library. A very easy way would be to be edit the .csproj file of a project in the solution that contains the same nuget package library, copy the reference of the nuget in the ItemGroup and replace in the project that has the error. The reference should start contain ...\Assemblies\3rd party\ ... instead of a physical file location on your machine

Related

How can a project get its own NuGet package instead of using the one the solution uses?

I have a C# project, TrendMasterCS2, built in VS 2019 that uses a DLL, TrendData, that relies on System.Data.SQLite.Core, which I get through the NuGet Package Manager. I opened the TrendMasterCS2 sollutio and uninstalled all NuGet packages from both the executable project and the DLL project. Then, I added the System.Data.SQLite.Core package to the TrendData project. I saved all files, and then opened the project file in Notepad. I saw this:
<Reference Include="System.Data.SQLite, Version=1.0.113.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=db937bc2d44ff139, processorArchitecture=MSIL">
<HintPath>..\TrendMasterCS2\packages\Stub.System.Data.SQLite.Core.NetFramework.1.0.113.3\lib\net45\System.Data.SQLite.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>
This looks like a problem to me. If I ever want to use the TrendData DLL in some other solution, it's going to be carrying around this dependency on the TrendMaster2 folder. I think I can open TrendData by itself in VS2019 and add the NuGet package there, but is that what I have to do to ensure that TrendData is independent of TrendMasterCS2?
Consider to migrate from packages.config to PackageReference. (In Visual Studio, right click the packages.config and select Migrate packages.config to PackageReference...).
One benefit of PackageReference is that all packages will be restored to a global package cache directory and the tooling takes care of the actual reference path at compile time.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/consume-packages/migrate-packages-config-to-package-reference for details.
As an alternative you could create a nuget.config file and change the repositoryPath as described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/nuget-config-file#packagerestore-section
However I did not get managed to store packages in a project-local path using nuget.config.

OctoPack failing in TFS Build

I'm using Visual Studio Online with Visual Studio 2013. The build fails with
You are trying to build with OctoPack, but the NuGet targets file that OctoPack depends on is not available on this computer. This is probably because the OctoPack package has not been committed to source control, or NuGet Package Restore is not enabled
According to this link https://octopusdeploy.com/blog/octopack-3.0 I need to make some changes to get package restore working properly, but another link within the previous one says that no configuration is required if using VS2013 and Visual Studio Online Nuget.org
When I build in VS all of the packages get restored first and then the project builds. Also if I build the project and invoke Octopack via command line everything works fine. Thoughts?
If you do run NuGet Package Restore before building, this should work. However, make sure the path in your project file referring to OctoPack.targets is correct - you might have moved your packages folder or the project file and the relative paths no longer match. Easiest way to fix it would be to run Update-Package -Reinstall Octopack.
NuGet Package Restore was recently changed so you wouldn't need to include NuGet in the solution to do a package restore. However, OctoPack still needs NuGet on the path so it can find it. You can try explicitly specifying the path to NuGet by adding this parameter when calling OctoPack.
/p:OctoPackNuGetExePath=<path>\nuget.exe
You just need to check in the Octopack targets file.
\packages\OctoPack.2.0.26\targets\OctoPack.targets

NuGet package files not being copied to project content during build

I am building an MVC4 web application with VS2012 professional with NuGet Package Manager version 2.2.31210. I have multiple projects in my solution, all sharing various packages I installed using NuGet. One of my projects is an MVC4 web application where I am using packages such as bootstrap, jquery UI, etc, all installed using NuGet.
When I clone a fresh copy of my entire solution from my repository and build my MVC4 project, the package restore feature seems to be working: it creates the packages directory under the solution direcotry and populates it will all the versions of the packages I expect to see. However, the content files do not get copied to the appropriate places in the MVC app directory. The weird thing is that it does create directories for the content, but does not copy the content files themselves.
For example, I am using the Twitter Bootstrap package which appears in the packages/Twitter.Bootstrap.2.2.2. In the MVC project a directory called bootstrap (containing css, img, and js directories) gets created in the Content directory. But, no css or js files are copied into those directories!
Does anyone have a clue what magic incantation I must utter to get the build to copy these content files from the NuGet packages directory?
This is a very common issue we are all having. I've created an MSBuild Task NugetContentRestoreTask that will do this trick for you. Run the following command in the Package Manager Console:
Install Nuget Content Restore MSBuild Targets
PM> Install-Package MSBuild.NugetContentRestore
The only thing left is to call it from your BeforeBuild Target with something like this:
Project File Targets
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
<NugetContentRestoreTask SolutionDir="$(SolutionDir)" ProjectDir="$(ProjectDir)" />
</Target>
You can take a look at the source repo and find it on nuget.org
Additional Content Folders
This nuget only includes the default folders scripts, images, fonts, and content, it is not a recursive directory includes. For additional content subfolders - you must assign the property AdditionalFolders.
<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
<NugetContentRestoreTask SolutionDir="$(SolutionDir)" ProjectDir="$(ProjectDir)"
AdditionalFolders="less;sass;common" />
</Target>
I have found a workaround, but it is ugly. By executing the following command in the NuGet Package Manager Console: Update-Package -Reinstall all the files are indeed copied to their proper places within the Mvc project Content and Scripts directories.
Unfortunately, this is risky because you are likely to end up with the wrong versions of certain packages. For example, in my case after the command finishes executing (which takes quite a while by the way), I end up with jQuery version 1.4.4. This is way old, and I assume it must be an explicit dependency of some other package that is being updated. So it appears that the order in which the packages actually get updated by NuGet is significant (it does not appear to parse the entire dependency tree for all packages and pick only the latest versions from the union of all dependencies, which seems like it would be the preferred behavior). Rather, as the command executes I see it replacing the jQuery package several times with different versions as it works its way through all the packages and their dependencies, only to end up with a very old version.
A similar approach is the execute the Update-Package -Reinstall command explicitly for each package that is causing my problem, but this is incredibly tedious and error prone.
The NuGet Package Restore feature should yield the same result as manually executing the Install-Package or Update-Package -Reinstall command for a package, but it does not.
I don't like to have the thirdparty JavaScript files under source control either. Thats why I've followed Jeff Handley advice in http://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/2094 to create a solution my self. I didn't go the executable way, but created a nuget solution level package which does the trick.
http://www.nuget.org/packages/Baseclass.Contrib.Nuget.GitIgnoreContent/
It's tied to git, as it automatically updates the .gitignore file.
Short description:
Ignore nuget content files in git:
Generate entries in the .gitignore file to exclude nuget content files from the source repository
Restore nuget content files before building (Automatically in VS and manually with a powershell script
I've written a blog post describing how to use it.
http://www.baseclass.ch/blog/Lists/Beitraege/Post.aspx?ID=9&mobile=0
In Visual Studio 2015 Update 1, they now support contentFiles. The caveat with this is that it only works in projects that use project.json.
In reference to the problem that you are having, there is a good blog post that explains why you see this behaviour: NuGet Package Restore Common Misconceptions.
For my projects it turned out that content files work with PackageReferences only:
Existing project with nuget references via packages.config
Installed NuGet package with content files
Build project
No content files in output directory
Conversion of packages.config to PackageReferences
Build project
Content files have been copied to output directory
IDE is Visual Studio 2017. The project is an application project which means it is in the old csproj format.

Nuget package restore with local feed

I'm trying to get nuget package restore working in a solution that is looking for packages in the regular, public nuget feed and in a local feed located on a shared network drive.
What I've tried so far is enabling nuget package restore on the solution, then editing the Nuget.targets and changing the PackageSources variable, but that doesn't seem to work. Is this possible?
My Nuget.targets file looks like this for the package sources section:
<ItemGroup Condition=" '$(PackageSources)' == '' ">
<!-- Package sources used to restore packages. By default, registered sources under %APPDATA%\NuGet\NuGet.Config will be used -->
<!-- The official NuGet package source (https://nuget.org/api/v2/) will be excluded if package sources are specified and it does not appear in the list -->
<PackageSource Include="https://nuget.org/api/v2/" />
<PackageSource Include="\\mynetworkshare\Development\NugetPackages" />
</ItemGroup>
The error I get on build is "Unable to find version '1.0.0' of package 'MyCustomPackage'. I have verified that the nupkg exists at \\mynetworkshare\Development\NugetPackages\MyCustomPackage.1.0.0.nupkg.
The fix for me was bhuvak's answer plus I had to rename some packages.
I had been creating symbols packages (named similar to MyCustomPackage.1.0.0.symbols.nupkg) and using those from my local package feed folder. However, package restore doesn't seem to pick those up. I had to rename them, removing the .symbols portion of the file name.
After I did that, package restore works great.
Updating the sources in NuGet.targets should work.
Make sure you have added both official NuGet source and local feed explicitly in the targets file.
What error are you noticing ?
We had a similar issue to #evan. We're using the CreateNewNuGetPackageFromProjectAfterEachBuild package to create our NuGet packages on a TFS 2013 build server. We have a local, share based package source and copy the nupkg files from the build output to this share. We found that builds that reference these packages fail because NuGet package restore fails to find the packages in the local source.
Running NuGet from the command line on the build server we get strange behaviour:
nuget.exe list <search-term-for-our-packages> -allversions
always succeeds and lists each version of our packages. However, when we go to a failed build's \src folder and run
nuget.exe restore .\oursolution.sln
we always get:
Unable to find version '1.0.6.341' of package 'our.package.name'.
I tried all sorts of things to resolve this, playing with nuget.config and swapping between versions of nuget.exe but the fix was simply to do with the naming of our nupkg files. By default CreateNewNuGetPackageFromProjectAfterEachBuild names the nupkg that it generates as the package Id plus the build configuration and target. E.g.
our.package.name.1.0.6.341.Release.AnyCPU.nupkg
With this file in our package source nuget list works but nuget restore fails. When I rename the package to
our.package.name.1.0.6.341.nupkg
then nuget list and nuget restore work as expected.
Our fix is simply to modify the config file of CreateNewNuGetPackageFromProjectAfterEachBuild to prevent it including the build configuration and target. But why does nuget restore depend on the package file name whereas nuget list doesn't?

NuGet and Portable Class Libraries - Package doesn't target any framework

I have been using NuGet to manage my internally created assemblies for a few months, and it's working very well. I recently 'discovered' portable class libraries, which has also been great - until it's time to install the packages.
Say I have a PCL that targets .NET 4.5, SL5 and .NET for Windows Store Apps. I run nuget spec to create the .nuspec file, edit the values, package it up, and add the .nupkg to our internal feed. If I open the .nupkg file in the Package Explorer, I see one content folder under lib called portable-win+net45+sl50.
When I try to install the package from any compatible project in another solution, I get the following message:
"'Project.PCL' could not be installed because it is not compatible with any project in the solution. The package doesn't target any framework."
If I manually create the .nupkg in the Package Explorer, updating the version number, adding a lib folder for each targeted framework (not a portable folder) and added the Project.PCL.dll to each folder, I can add the package to the compatible projects in the solution. But to do this process every time I want to update a PCl is somewhat tedious (I had been creating a little .cmd file in the project root folder to quickly package and deploy).
Do other people have this problem? How can I package PCL's in the same way as other types of projects?
Note - I'm using VS 2012 Ultimate and NuGet 2.2
It sounds like maybe nuget spec doesn't work for Portable Class Libraries - that's worth starting a thread or filing an issue on the NuGet site.
However, you can also create a .nuspec file from NuGet Package Explorer. Just create the package as you already did, but then choose "Save Metadata As..." to save it as a .nuspec. Afterwards you may need to edit the source paths in the nuspec file manually, but you should be able to automate the creation of the package.
For me nuget spec and nuget pack worked fine with a portable project while creating the package and installing it on a compatible project.
Do you want to check if you have the latest nuget.exe (2.2), it can be downloaded from http://nuget.org/nuget.exe or can be updated by running nuget update -self