Nuget Standalone

This little sample shows how to use Nuget.exe to install packages and update them, without having a Visual C#/Basic/F# project. In particular, in this sample I download NUnit 2.6.1 then I update it (to at least version 2.6.2), making sure that in the end I have in the project folder only the latest version.

1. Download Nuget.exe from http://nuget.codeplex.com/releases/view/58939
2. Make sure that Nuget.exe is in the repo folder or in the PATH
3. open a Powershell prompt
4. invoke install.ps1 or install_without_version.ps1 (more on this later). NUnit will be installed and updated in the packages folder

Quick explanation for install.ps1

This script install the packages following the default behaviour that Nuget has in Visual Studio -- the dlls are kept in folders whose name contains the version of the assembly.

The installation works out of the box, just by having the packages.config file -- nuget installwill download the library version specified in it.

The update is a little tricky -- we have to let Nuget think that it is updating a project, otherwise the update will not start. To achieve this, we insert an empty csproj file.

Finally, to have a clean packages folder (with only the latest version of NUnit) I simply delete the folder and repeat the installation -- the update has changed packages.config to point to the latest version of the library, so the install will grab it directly (copying it from local and not downloading it again).

Quick explanation for install_without_version.ps1

For little projects it is annoying to have the version number in the folder that contains the assembly -- at every update we should update the build file with the new folder.

I discovered in this post that Nuget.exe install has an -ExcludeVersion parameter that "deletes" the version name from the folder path.

So, with regard with install.ps1, install_without_version.ps1 has the following changes:

• it always removes the packages folder at the beginning;
• it does as before an install/update cycle to get latest versions -- this seems to work only if Nuget.exe install is done without -ExcludeVersion;
• it then deletes the packages folder and do Nuget.exe install -ExcludeVersion.