I have a nuget package that can be applied to any type of C# project.
It has a file that is added to the project as part of the package. The NuSpec looks like this:
<files>
<file src="Content\App_Start\StartUpCode.cs.pp" target="content\App_Start" />
I am using WebActivator to run the code in the file at application start.
I run into a problem when the nuget package is applied to several projects in the same solution. I get several instances of the StartUpCode.cs added, and as a result WebActivator runs the code several times.
How can I stop this code from being added to a project that is not web related? I.e. it's cool to add it to a WebAPI project, or a WebForms project, but not a class library.
I don't think there's anything in the Nuget spec that would allow you to do that easily. Maybe use a Powershell install script and detect the type of project it's being installed into and/or if the assembly has been referenced previously?
Personally, I'd split it into two Nuget packages. One with the business logic, and then another with the WebActivator dependency.
Related
I am working on a nunit engine extension which will be shipped as a nuget package.
Following the advises in How to implement NUnit's NUnit.Engine.ITestEventListener i was able to write the extension.
This solution is working as long as the project which contains the extension (the .cs file as well as the .addins file) is being imported to the target project which will perform the nunit tests.
As soon as I create a nuget package (following Quickstart: Create and publish a NuGet package using Visual Studio (.NET Standard, Windows only)) from the extension project and install this package to a test project, the extension doesn't work anymore.
I assume there is a problem with providing the .addins file within the nuget package so that the nunit engine in the target project can find the extension.
I already tried to ship the .addins file within the nuget package by adding the following lines to the .csproj file of the extension project.
<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="file.addins">
<Pack>true</Pack>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
If I add the .addins file to the target project by hand, the engine extension starts working.
How can a nunit engine extension be shipped as a nuget package without any adjustments by hand?
Im using NUnit(3.13.2).
Im quite new to nunit, nuget and writing questions on stack overflow. So if I'm missing something obvious here, I'm sorry.
This is one of those areas where I wish things were less complicated, unfortunately. Since extensions are found through a relative path from the NUnit engine to the package content, it depends on where both the engine and runner are located and where the package is located on your machine.
Here are some initial guidelines...
How to structure the package itself... your extension assembly itself should be in the tools directory. If there are other assemblies with it, which it references, it's best to also include a .addins file in the same directory, which lists that assembly on a single line. That way, the NUnit engine will save time by only examining the extension assembly.
A NuGet extension package will automatically be found by the engine if the runner has been installed as a nuget package as well. This works no matter how the packages are installed on your machine, i.e. using packages.config or in a nuget cache, provided both packages were installed the same way. (That proviso is a real gotcha and it may be that a future version of the engine needs to actually understand nuget.) See the addins file provided with the the NUnit 3 console runner as an example of why this works.
The same thing is true if both the runner and the extension are installed as chocolatey packages, because they are both in the chocolatey cache. If you do provide one (which I recomend) it has to be a "native" package - one that includes the actual binaries. A chocolatey package that merely invokes the nuget package will not work. See the source for any of the NUnit-provided extensions for an example of how this this is done.
If the executing copy of the engine (usually in the same directory as the runner) is anywhere else, there is no automatic way for the extension to be found. This includes the case where you are building a runner yourself and want the extension to be available while you are developing. In that case, you need to fully understand how the engine finds extensions (see the docs) and manually create an addins file (next to any that was distributed with the engine) containing the proper relative path.
This is especially complicated if you are developing an extension for general release. Then you have to deal with various runners installed in different ways by different people. OTOH, if you are doing this for internal use in your company, you may only need to deal with one of them. If you add more specifics about your goal to the question, I'll edit this with some more specific suggestions.
We have solution with a lot of projects and a more or less complex dependency graph between those projects. Now each of those projects should become its own nuget package and the dependency graph of the nuget packages should mirror the on of the projects.
I have two questions:
Is it possible to achieve this while keeping all projects within the same solution? If so how?
Is advisable to keep all projects in the same solution? What would be the a common / "best practice" approach to this?
The situation in our project is the same and we took the following approach:
The first step is to create the nuspec files defining your packages. We have placed all theses files in a folder named ".nuspec" which is located in the solution's root directory. The nuspec files are added to the solution in a solution folder that is named ".nuspec", too.
The solution itself has a global AssemblyInfo file that contains the versioning information as well as some copyright stuff - in short all information that is common between our projects. Each project then has its own assembly info adding the information specific to each project.
The nuspec files do not contain a version. Instead we use $(version) as a placeholder there:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/packaging/2011/08/nuspec.xsd">
<metadata>
<id>MyCompany.MyProduct.Server.DataAccess</id>
<version>$(Version)</version>
<authors>MyCompany</authors>
<projectUrl>http://example.com/myProduct.html</projectUrl>
<iconUrl>http://example.com/myProduct.icon.png</iconUrl>
<requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
<description>Some description goes here.</description>
<summary>The summary goes here</summary>
<copyright>Copyright © MyCompany 2015</copyright>
<language>en-US</language>
<dependencies>
<dependency id="MyCompany.MyProduct.Common" version="$(Version)" />
<dependency id="MyCompany.MyProduct.Server" version="$(Version)" />
</dependencies>
</metadata>
<files>
<file src="path\to\MyCompany.MyProduct.Server.DataAccess.dll" target="lib\net45\MyCompany.MyProduct.Server.DataAccess.dll" />
</files>
</package>
(Of course the dependencies might have dependencies themselves. The server component might reference a logging component for example.)
Initially we created a console application reading the version of the solution from the global AssemblyInfo file and parsing it into all of the nuspec files before creating and publishing the packages.
The console application worked well, but was a bit tedious to maintain in a TFS environment with continuous integration enabled. So we defined a custom TFS build template doing this work. All we need to do now to create a set of nuget packages for all of our projects is to trigger a TFS build.
This approach has the advantage that all packages have the same version and thus work well together.
This approach has the disadvantage that all packages have the same version and cannot be released independently.
We chose that approach because it prevented us from producing a conglomerate of badly integrated components. Our projects provide a small framework that is used to develop small LOB-applications that all are quite similar. Due to the fact that we deliver the framework in a set of different packages the developers can choose which of the packages they actually need and then install only those. Should a developer decide to add a missing functionality lateron he just installs the relevant packages that have the same version as those already installed. Thus there's no need to worry about compatibility.
Currently, in VS 2017 you can have several library projects in a solution which are built into separate packages and also reference each other by <ProjectReference>. Surprisingly, VS is smart enough to use <ProjectReference> when building solution AND to produce correct package <dependencies> for referenced projects in nuspec. In other words, you can conveniently work with many projects simultaneously in one solution and have them all published as a set of packages depending on each other.
Yes, you can "probably" make this work. I say probably because I haven't tried it, but I would approach it with something like this: https://www.nuget.org/packages/CreateNewNuGetPackageFromProjectAfterEachBuild/ with a manual nuspec defining your references would work. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could write some post-build Roslyn code to parse your project dependencies and build up the nuget dependency tree. That said, don't do this, in a non-trivial solution, its almost guaranteed to become manual and brittle pretty fast.
Ultimately, it's much preferable to just break your solution up -- create a solution per Nuget package, and pull in your dependencies using Nuget itself. Assuming you have a build/CI server, this should be fairly trivial. Just run your own Nuget repo and publish the build artifacts as they get built -- that way your dependent projects will pull the latest package you JUST built. You'll want to ensure your build process refreshes Nuget each time and you can use the standard nuget spec command as a post-build step. As a nice bonus, it'll force everyone working on the code to really think thru the dependencies when making changes.
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.
I have some NuGet package that contains both DLL file and web related files like JavaScript, Stylesheet and image files. I want to create package that only install web related file to web project only (including ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC project). What is the easiest way to do that?
Thanks,
PS. I think it should be possible via Powershell script. But I think, it is quite complex for me.
You probably want to use the Nuget Package Explorer. It allows you to create a package without the command line and add only the required files to your package (plus some easy config).
If I understand you correctly, you sometimes want to install just the DLL, and sometimes the DLL plus the web stuff. In this case it's best to create a separate package for the DLL, then another package with the web stuff which specifies the DLL package as a dependency of the Web package. This way it will automatically add the DLL when you add the Web content.
Here's a tutorial on Nuget Package Explorer that will probably help you.
I have a solution which I am using in several projects which works pretty nicely.
Create a second .Assets project, which contains the Assets, and reference all the files as links in your project, and mark them as embedded resources.
YourProject.Assets - contains the css/html/js/cshtml files
YourProject - files included as links, marked as Embedded Resource
Then include my EmbeddedResourceVirtualPathProvider Nuget package, and it will serve you assets from the Embedded Resources in YourProject.dll.
If someones wants to override the resources, they can install the .Assets nuget package and they will be included in their project and served.
Say I have the following solution with multiple versions of the same code each targeting a different framework and I would like to generate a nuget package from it.
SharedLib.sln
SharedLib.Net35.csproj
packages.config
SharedLib.Net40.csproj
packages.config
SharedLib.Phone.csproj
packages.config
SharedLib.SL4.csproj
packages.config
The expected nupkg has the following structure
SharedLib.1.0.nupkg
lib/net35/SharedLib.dll
lib/net40/SharedLib.dll
lib/sl4-wp/SharedLib.dll
lib/sl4/SharedLib.dll
nuget.exe pack SharedLib.SL4.csproj will automatically determine that the target framework is SilverLight4 and place the binaries in lib/sl4
I know I can add a SharedLib.SL4.nuspec file with a <file> section to include binaries from the other projects but is there a way to make nuget automatically place the combined solution output into the proper structure (and also detect dependencies in packages.config from all projects?
No, there's currently no way to do this other than to write a custom build script that puts the files in the right place and then runs NuGet pack on them, or to take the .nuspec approach you described.
This is a feature we'd like to have, but haven't thought of a good way to do it. However, your post just gave me an idea.
Today, you can point nuget pack at a .csproj file.
We could consider an approach that allowed you to point it at a .sln file and if the project names follow some convention, we'd package all the projects into a single package.
If you really want this feature, consider logging an issue in the NuGet issue tracker. http://nuget.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic