My project has a dependency on a certain NuGet package (Jint, to be specific). A bugfix was committed to the trunk of that project a couple of months ago that I need to have in my project, but an update hasn't been pushed to NuGet.org yet.
What are some best practices in dealing with this situation?
Things I've considered:
Pull down the source and put it directly into my project. I don't really want to do this because it's going to pollute my repo with the source of some other project.
Build the source and hard link the .dll into my project, maybe putting the .dll in the repo. Seems sort of okay, but I don't typically like to check binaries into my source control.
Build the source, package into a NuGet package and post it to a private NuGet feed. This seems like the least-worst solution, but a big pain.
If anyone has successfully dealt with this scenario before, I'd love to hear what your approach was.
Related
I've got a few Nuget packages that are SDKs for third-party APIs. Now, their download count is in the low thousands, but I know a large proportion of that is going to be from my CI/CD pipelines and me doing nuget restores whilst developing and whatnot.
So, I'd like to know if anyone is actually using my projects. It's not the end of the world if not, because I made them because I needed them, but it'd be good to know if I've helped someone.
Is there any way to reliably establish if any projects are consuming my nuget package, assuming that these are published publicly on Github? The best I can think of is just googling the name of my package but that's not proving very fruitful.
Using Github itself might work. Maybe there is a good method around, but this is the best I could find get in my three minutes test.
https://github.com/search?l=XML&q=RestSharp.105&type=Code
https://github.com/search?l=XML&q=Hypermedia.Core&type=Code
https://github.com/search?l=XML&q=DiscosWebSdk&type=code
Is way less than perfect, but better than Google for the matter at hand.
Is there any way to reliably establish if any projects are consuming my nuget package?
The closest would be, in nuget.org/packages, the Used By section which lists:
NuGet packages that depend on xxx,
GitHub repositories that depend on xxx.
We've got about two dozen projects, which all use different NuGet-packages and a bunch of Telerik WPF libraries, the latter are usually added by GAC, which on its own does not add a hint path to the csproj-File. (Good)
As soon as we use Telerik's upgrade wizard to simultaneously upgrade the references of all projects, Telerik starts copying the files to a local lib folder next to the bin folder and adds hintpaths, which do not exist on other developers machines AND need to be discarded before pushing to Git every time. (Bad)
BTW: We regularly get the same problem (regarding hintpath) with the Spire NuGet-Package.
Now we came up with some suggestions, which we internally valued differently and therefore did not come to an accord:
Keep discarding the chunks containing the hint path
Ask Telerik to fix the wizard
Check the libraries into Git
Add Telerik libraries using their NuGet server
Create a Libaries-Path we manage by hand, maybe as a network drive
What's other peoples approach to handling those issues?
I'd go for "Check the libraries into git".
Rationale: when a developer (or CI system) checks out your project from source control, he should be able to build it right away without having to install dependencies like GAC assemblies.
You need to use NuGet for that, it's the easiest and most organized way, you should not have a problem for other developers when you install a new package as long as you are committing package.config file, in this case any one will do a build of the solution visual studio will automatically restore NuGet Package.
Make sure to set your NuGet settings as below image shows:
Don't use the Telerik wizard. Add the Telerik dependencies using NuGet. They have a private NuGet repository. See the tutorial here.
We have 1 solution that contains all of our shared assemblies. Currently we are referencing these assemblies based on relative path (../../../../../SharedSolution/bin). It would be nice to create a nuget package (or a few based on various dependencies) to reference these assemblies so I can get easily update and I don't have to worry about having the exact same directory structure as everyone else on the team and all the other benefits of nuget.
However, let's say that when I'm working in my ProjectASolution, I realize that I need to make a change or add a shared class to SharedSolution. In my ProjectASolution if I have referenced the assemblies from SharedSolution with a nuget package, but I want to test my changes to SharedSolution before committing them, is the only way to copy the assemblies from the SharedSolution bin to ProjectASolution's packages folder?
Since we are frequently editing classes in SharedSolution, I'm beginning to think that nuget might not be the right way to share these assemblies.
Another possible solution is to add the projects from SharedSolution as links to any of my ProjectSolutions that need to reference them. Is this a better alternative?
Is there a better way to share these assemblies than relative path? Is there an easy way to test changes made on a dev machine to a nuget package?
You can build a pre-release package. Only developers who set their nuget to use pre-release packages will see them, everyone else will be still using the latest stable.
A good explanation and How-To can be found on the NuGet Pre-Release Package page.
To address the questions you raised in your comment:
You can build nuget packages locally, based on the .nuspec file which is usually next to the .nupkg file in the packages folder. You can use NuGet Package Explorer to do so in a GUI.
To distribute them, you can store the pre-release packages on a network folder. Any developer interested in the pre-release package can add this network folder to their nuget sources and can then use the Visual Studio-integrated nuget as usual. Or you can just copy them the .nupkg file.
You should be using as much self-contained testing as possible for an assembly before publishing a new package. Ideally, anything you would be putting into a NuGet package would be fully covered by unit tests and, if necessary, some kind of test app.
Also, if you're going to use NuGet, I would look at splitting up some of those assemblies if possible. It's easier to maintain references and track real updates to packages if they're in logically separated sets rather than one mega package.
I need to get my external dll dependencies (automap, others ...) into a situation where I can build them on my build server. I would also like to get then them into subversion, so the build server can pick them up.
So I'm new to the whole 'lib' folder thing. I've searched Google, but it seems it's kind of assumed, there are no basics of what to do here. The books I own don't go into it. It's been a long time since I had a mentor at work, or even someone I could ask questions of ... and I'd really love to understand the fundamentals of what I should be doing here.
I write in .Net, use Jenkins as my CI server (new to that) and msbuild (new to that too). I'm hearing svn:externals (don't compute), NuGet ....
Please help!
Suppose my solution is called MySolution and is stored in C:\MySolution, then I have have three directories for binaries, all managed by source control.
vendor the source code of third party frameworks. If needed they are built and signed (with my key) and treated as if the code was my own. This is sometimes necessary to "fix" defects in the framework or debug their source to understand why it fails.
src\packages modules managed by nuget (I wished to combine this with my "lib" folder, but that isn't yet supported)
lib compiled libraries for which I don't have the source and that are not managed by nuget.
(I have omitted folders like "src", "sample", "setup", "documentation" and "scripts" to keep the answer specific to the OP).
The recent months I started to create my own nuget packages for "packages" in the lib folder so I can migrate all of them to "packages". Its published to a private nuget server. It also simplify managing the binaries across solutions.
I use to use externs, but they pose a branching nightmare after a while because you have to branch and pin the external dependencies to. With nuget this is no longer needed.
I would definitely avoid putting binaries in source control. You'd be far better off creating your own nuget repository containing your preferred versions of packages and either using nuget restore or some other way of "rehydrating" your dependencies for building. I use a simple batch file called nuget-update.bat which just looks at all packages.config files and gets any dependencies it finds.
It seems that you posted a sequence of questions on the same topic. I recommend NuGet, as it becomes critical and promoted hard by Microsoft. However, many old libraries are not available there, and you may still need to keep a lib folder. My open source project #SNMP is a good example,
I tried to use as many NuGet packages as possible, and even stepped up to maintain some of the dependencies, such as DockPanel Suite.
I have an issue with creating an easy solution for my build system, based on mono.
Current situation is that I keep my referenced libraries inside the git repository, which is not good, for many obvious reasons.
What I want to achieve is something like what NuGet provides - automatically download dlls from the Web, put them in some directory and forget about them.
I want to do this at build time, so it would not require any additional actions with downloading libraries etc. The best option would be an msbuild (xbuild on mono) task, but I want it to be system independent, so the popular one, executing NuGet.exe, is out of question (consider parallel mono installations, etc.).
I've tried Pepita project, but it's... wrong. No, really, it is, it has too many design mistakes to be easy to use or repair. To make a proper configuration would require a serious rewrite of the whole project.
What I would love is a library, that would employ NuGet.Core library and be available as a task. If such a lib is not there, I could use any solution, that would download a nuget package and unpack it to a directory specified in .csproj.
Even better, it would be nice if such a library could resolve dependencies without specifying them explicitly in packages.config (or similar) file, e.g. if I want to include Castle.Windsor I don't want to include Castle.Core in my config file.
I know about the OpenWrap project (with NuGet Gallery), it looks promising, but I can't find the solution where I would just put a constant set of libraries in my repo once, modify csproj files, some configs and have it done.
I can tell you that OpenWrap at the core has everything built-in to do what you want. Everything you can do with the openwrap-shell is also available to be called from msbuild. So, it seems to me that you would just need to add a before build hook to call out to openwrap to perform an "update-wrap". Several months back I actually looked into doing something similar. AFAIR I actually wrote an msbuild script to call openwrap tasks, but didn't really hook them into the normal build process.
I don't know exactly what you mean with "put a constant set of libraries in your repo once"? For OpenWrap, all you need to do is maintain the "openwrap descriptor" for your project. That file contains all direct dependencies of your project (with or without restrictions on version numbers). (Indirect dependencies are pulled in automatically) Are you wondering about how you get started when you have a bunch of binary dlls to start with? I can tell you what I did. Basically, I do not use any NuGet packages, I created OpenWrap packages for everything. I also created OpenWrap packages for all our binary dependencies (some of which are open-source). This is really super simple: you fill in correct dependencies in the OpenWrap descriptor and specify that the package must only contain the given dlls. We had a bunch of binary dependencies, but once you start packaging them, it's definitely not that much work.
If you want to see an example, you can check this one:
http://code.google.com/p/ppwcode/source/browse/dotnet/External/Apache.Log4Net/trunk/Apache.Log4Net.wrapdesc
That is all you have to do to package your binary dependencies. This is a package I created and we currently use it in the company where I work. I know Log4Net is probably available as a NuGet package, and I could probably use that. The advantage of creating those binary packages myself, is that I have full control over the packages, over the version numbering of the packages, over how a big project is split over several smaller packages and so on.
As an OpenWrap repo, you can use a folder on your local filesystem, or a folder on a network share. What we use, is actually a webdav repository that we mount locally on a drive (using Windows 7). This works fine for us and also allows us to specify who has read and write access to the repository.
You mention mono.... well, that might be a problem: the currently released version of OpenWrap (2.0.2) does not run on mono AFAIK. But the good news is that Sebastien Lambla has been working hard to get OpenWrap to run on mono+xbuild for the new version that is going to be released very soon: 2.0.3. No alpha/beta builds available yet, but you can build from git. (In that case you would need to build both openwrap-shell and openwrap). Sebastien Lambla, who created OpenWrap, normally keeps an eye on questions on StackOverflow and will probably be able to give you a more complete answer on the mono status.
Btw, where I work, we are using OpenWrap already for over a year. Back then we compared both NuGet and OpenWrap, and at that moment OpenWrap was way way way ahead of NuGet. Basically, to me, NuGet was not a tool for dependency management, but a tool to assist you in Visual Studio to pull in binary dependencies from a remote server (meaning: copy dll from remote server to local folder and add reference to local dll in project file). In the mean time, NuGet has been playing catch-up with OpenWrap and has added functionality that already existed in OpenWrap. There are in my opinion only 2 things that NuGet has over OpenWrap and that is integration in Visual Studio (aka overview of remotely available packages and click-click-click adding of packages) and the fact that it is maintained by Microsoft people (AFAIK). Both things are just political: it's easier to convince people with a pretty interface and microsoft support. Personally, however, I think that OpenWrap is technically superior and I think it's really a pity that it doesn't get the attention that it deserves.