Are there any guidelines or recommendations for managing libraries that aren't on nuget along with the packages that are.
Most of these may be 3rd party libraries that may never go on nuget unless we specifically put them on.
Is it best to keep these dlls out of the same folder that nuget uses to store its downloaded dlls or is it better to keep them together?
We would be looking at moving to DVCS once we sort this out and would probably add an ignore file to ignore the whole packages directory (and possibly add exclusions for these non-nuget dlls or just force them to be checked in if they ever do change).
My Personal Preferences (In Order)
Create a package and add it to NuGet (if licensing allows)
Create a package and put it in a private repository
Create a folder in the solution, store them all in there, add them to source control. Different folder than the nuget packages folder as it's clearer what it is and I don't add nuget dlls to source control.
For 1 & 2 i would recommend using Restore Package on build rather than storing it in your source control.
I'd also highly recommend against referencing any 3rd party controls from install folders or the GAC.
Related
I have a situation where we have multiple C# projects that use similar set of Nuget packages (ex. Newton Json, Microsoft Compilers and CodeDom, Owin, log4net, jQuery, EntityFramework etc.)
I am trying to see how we can have a shared location for all Nuget packages to reduce the footprint of those binaries in Git, having a single repo for them by centralizing them in one place.
One option I found is to use Nuget.config in each project with repositoryPath set to point at the shared location. This works great for adding/upgrading/restoring Nuget packages in the project but it is not very clean when a package gets removed from one project but is still required in a different one. Basically the package will get removed from the shared location and the change is committed to Git, then when the other project requires it, it would get restored and added back to Git. Not a perfect solution in my mind.
I have a two part question:
1. Is there a way to improve the above workflow when packages get removed?
2. What is the industry standard for handling third party libraries delivered via Nuget? Or if there is none, can you share your experience handling Nuget packages across multiple projects.
If the concern lies with the footprint/organization of the Git repository, maybe you can do a .git ignore for the dependencies folders to prevent git from committing them into the repositories. When you need to build the projects from source, just do a dotnet /nuget restore to get the dependencies from the source you configured in the Nuget.config
Not sure if it is the industry standard, but we host our own Nuget server to control the libraries that the different teams can use. Microsoft has an article on Hosting your own NuGet feeds
Hope it helps.
When creating an open source library on GitHub or another public website, should I publish the .nuspec file that describes the corresponding NuGet package?
I've done this a couple of times (since no API key or other sensitive information is included in the .nuspec file) in order to allow myself to easily publish subsequent versions without keeping private file, and to allow other people to fork it and add their own descriptions easily. However, the developers of many top packages don't seem to publish .nuspec files in their repositories (sometimes they publish NuGet.exe along with a .targets file, and so on), so I'm thinking that maybe I'm doing something wrong.
The package authoring should be considered part of the source code since it is a required asset to build the fully usable output.
Some projects use special msbuild-based tooling to create the nuspec file during the build so it seems like there is none in the repository. the new "SDK-based" projects (e.g. .NET Standard libraries) have integrated nuget tooling to be able to create a nupkg file from the csproj without the need to create a nuspec file. This tooling is also being adopted by some popular packages (e.g. Newtonsoft.Json).
I'm actually thinking about the pro and cons about using NuGet. In our current software we're storing each external reference in a common reference folder (which is commited to our SW versioning system). Over time this approach becomes more and more painful because we've to store different versions to the same library.
Since our devs are sometimes at the customer site (where not all customers are offering internet connectivity ...) we won't use NuGet directly, because NuGet packages can't be restored.
Based on that I'm actually thinking about using NuGet and store the packages folder in our SW versioning system.
Does anybody know if there are some disadvantages about this solution? Does anybody have a better proposal?
Thx.
I would argue against storing external nuget packages in your version control system.
It's not your application's responsibility to archive third party packages. Should you need to take care of that risk then build a solution intended for such (for example: use private nuget repository that's properly backed up).
Avoid duplication in code base - provided you use properly released packages, then the packages.config file content is sufficient for reliably reproducing the exact dependencies your application needs.
Synchronization is an effort - keeping packages.config and packages folder in sync- once you start including them in source control every developer working with packages would monitor and add or remove packages to source control.
If devs ever forget to add then local build still fails.
If they forget to remove no longer necessary piece then your downloadable set would contain junk.
VCS dataset size - storing them would needlessly enlarge your version control storage. Quite often the packages contain N different platform dlls, tools and whatnot which add up quite fast. Should you keep your dependencies constantly up to date, then after 10 years your VCS history would contain huige amount of irrelevant junk. Storage is cheap, but still..
Instead, consider having a private nuget repository with the purpose of serving and archiving the packages your application needs and set up your project to check your project nuget repository first. If your developers need offline compile support then they can set up project repository mirrors on their build boxes and configure the following fallback structure for repos:
Developer local project repository (ex: folder)
Shared project repository (ex: Nuget.Server)
(nuget.org)
A guide how to configure multiple repositories can be found here: How to configure local Nuget Repository.
We used nuget.server 2.8 to create a private feed for hosting nuget packages (mostly chocolatey packages) in our organization. I would like to improve/expand the indexing capability but I can't figure out how to do that.
I know in a typical nuget server feed, all the .NUPKG files would be in the root of the package path specified in the config. Long story short, we have a requirement for a folder structure in that package feed as different groups within the organization will be using SVN to commit data which ends up here. To easily manage this, we need a more complex folder structure.
However what I have found is that .NUPKGs in the root of the package path or one folder deep are indexed and available via the feed. Once you go two folders deep, the NUPKG files aren't indexed and aren't available via the nuget feed. Is there a relatively easy way I can change that? Is that a setting specified somewhere? I can't seem to find where this limitation is coming from. Any direction would be outstanding.
We've had a few users request such a feature for ProGet, but ultimately decided against implementing the feature because of the problem of not only dealing with duplicate packages, but communicating that problem to the user.
Remember that a valid NuGet package must have a file name that matches its version+id (e.g. MyPackage.1.2.nupkg can only be MyPackage v1.2). Thus if you have folderA\MyPackage.1.2.nupkg and folderB\MyPackage.1.2.nupkg, which is the valid? Do you invalidate both? Etc.
That said, it's trivial to implement, so you could simply use the ProGet SDK to build your own package store that inherits from the default, but iterates subdirectories as well.
As a side note, if you're serious about maintaining a private repository, you really should get something other than NuGet.Server. There are several available that can manage chocolately packages.
Symlinks is your best bet. You will just want to symlink those files up on a regular basis with a scheduled task.
I have to second Karl's answer on using something better than NuGet.Server. Depending on your growth potential, it can start to become unusable fast after you have 100+ packages in the repository. Note: I haven't checked this myself since 2012, it's possible it has better support now for multiple packages.
is it possible to use nuget to deploy test data instead of dlls?
we have some largish test data files which I don't want to keep in our git repository and I am wondering if we could deploy these to the test projects during the build by including them in a nuget package which gets installed during the build.
Is this possible?
Yes, but, without knowing a few more details about how your project is structured, it's difficult to tell you exactly how you would do this.
If you just want to copy your data files into a directory in your test project, you can just put the files in a content folder in a NuGet package, and it will copy them to your project automatically, much in the same way that it would copy DLLs. If this is all you need, you can create a package like this in a few minutes.
If you need to deploy the test data files to a directory outside of your project directory, or manipulate the file names or contents, you can do this as well. I usually create a tools package to do this.
I put the files I want to copy into a tools directory in my package, and then create a simple init.ps1 or install.ps1 script to do whatever copying and file manipulation tasks are required.
If you are intimidated by the prospect of creating packages from scratch, you may find NuGet Package Explorer helpful. You can create a content folder and drag the content you want to deploy into it:
http://npe.codeplex.com/