Packaging and distributing tools using NuGet

NuGet is an amazing tool to manage dependencies for external libraries. As part of Visual Studio it gives us an easy way to install and update those libraries over time. Now even Microsoft use it extensively to release updates to us. But the power of NuGet doesn't stop here. Some people found imaginative ways to use NuGet like the ScriptCs project and Chocolatey.

Another usage is to package and distribute utilities via NuGet packages like FAKE and xUnit.Runners. To create your own tool package you need to author a NuSpec file like this:

<package>
  …

  <files>
    <file src="tooling\app.exe" target="tools\" />
  </files>
</package>

The key here is to set all your file's target to tools\. Doing that the package will be considered a solution-level NuGet package and will be available solution wide instead of only for one project.

For example if I install the xUnit.Runners package to my solution like this:

PM> Install-Package xunit.runners

You will see that only a new package.config file will be created in the .nuget folder at the root of your solution. This is where all solution-level packages will be referenced. Nothing will actually change inside your projects.

After that all the files required to run the xUnit runner from the command line, PowerShell or a build script will be available from the \packages\xunit.runners.1.9.2\tools folder.

The power of NuGet doesn't stop there but we'll check that in another blog post.