I'm looking for advice on how to have team build 2013 use a pre-compiled common that is not checked in or part of the workspace.
Everything we build is QNX based and we are refactoring out a common set of components to be shared across all projects. I've looked at Go and NuGet but that seems like a lot effort for something like this.
What is the best way to pull a prebuilt common into a TFS Team Build?
So you would nuget "publish" a package.
https://docs.nuget.org/create/creating-and-publishing-a-package
then your build would nuget restore using a packages.config file (aka, NOT a .sln file)
nuget restore [<solution>|<packages.config file>]
https://docs.nuget.org/consume/command-line-reference
What VS (in a .sln file) is auto-voodooing some of this for you.
But using command line nuget (especially for the restore)....is a way to get a package out of nuget if you're build isn't based on .sln file.
Another way to think about it is...when you run "nuget install" or "nuget update", VS is auto-voodooing you a packages.config file. While you might look at the file and find it interesting, you're not consumed on how it works in the background of VS. But if you want to manually pull nuget packages....you will be very interested in how it is created.
What I would do as a test would be:
Create a dummy .sln,csproj file.
Nuget add a few random packages (using "Manage Nuget Packages for this solution).
Take that packages.config that was auto-voodoo created for you.... and move it to a clean directory.
See if you can run nuget.exe restore on it, and get/pull the packages (aka, you're testing that you can do a pull... without a .sln file being involved).
If that works...than it becomes of matter of creating your own nuget repository..creating your own published-package...and repeating #4 above to get that package out.
Make sense?
So I have these files in a clean directory:
.\packages.config
.\.nuget\NuGet.Config
.\.nuget\NuGet.exe
.\.nuget\NuGet.targets
Then I run in the comamand-window:
.\.nuget\nuget.exe restore .\packages.config -PackagesDirectory .\MyPackages
And all the packages listed in "packages.config" will download to : .\MyPackages
Note, if you have a custom nuget repository, that will need to be configured...but cross that bridge when you get there.
Related
I am attempting to create my first ever agent build using on my my asp.net mvc projects. The agent is on my own computer. Everything appears to work fine up until after the nuget restore.
Picture:
It is telling me that my System.Web.MVC assembly could not be located. Since this is of course my first build I am unsure of what to do or what could cause this issue especially since it builds fine locally in VS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated:
TFS Version: 16.122.27102.1
You can follow steps below to locate the cause of the issue and resolve it:
1.The Nuget 4.3.0 you're using is too old. Instead you should use recommended 5.7.0. (Modify your Use Nuget Task)
2.Check log of your restore step.
The missing System.Web.MVC comes from Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc nuget package, so you should make sure this package is actually downloaded/installed. And make sure the hintPath in your csproj is correct compared to the installation path of the nuget package.
Also make sure you're restoring for whole solution instead of one specific project.
Check whether you added packages folder into source control. The packages folder in SolutionDir should not be added into source control! It will affect the restore stop.
3.Check MSBuild arguments of Build task, you can share the arguments and build logs here if convenient.
I have a bit of a strange situation. 2 applications in the same tfs repository, both using near identical build definitions, both using nuget packages, one performs a package restore, one does not.
Both build definitions contain the 'Restore NuGet Packages' option checked:
both have same .sln and .vbproj file structures.
build log of the 'good' one gives:
and the 'bad' one doesnt:
Build controller/agent is the same, I cant see any difference in the build definition or the solution configuration.
My question is where do I start looking for why these are doing something different?
Turns out the packages.config files for each of the projects were not checked in to TFS, without these there was nothing to restore. Stupid error!
From this article -
"However, there are cases where it’s not actually a person who’s doing the building and who therefore can’t provide consent this way. (And where Visual Studio isn’t even installed.) The prototypical example is a build server. In that case, NuGet will also look for an environment variable called EnableNuGetPackageRestore. To enable package restore for scenarios where the Visual Studio option is not practical, set this variable to true."
How does TFS even know how to call nuget? Do I install the nuget exe?
As you've stated in a comment, "Enable NuGet Package Restore" is no longer the recommended method for accomplishing this. The NuGet docs explain it best. Basically, because that method is integrated into MSBuild, packages that extend the build will be downloaded too late. While I'm not sure what packages do this currently it appears that there are big plans for the future of NuGet (the new ASP.NET vNext custom CLR implementation is one example of where it's headed).
The good news is that the alternative is really easy to set up. If you're in VS, you literally do nothing (unless you've disabled the automatic package restore in the past). If you have a build server you just have to make some small changes to your .proj file. If you're not familiar with MSBuild it may seem challenging but it's really quite simple. The secret is this chunk of code:
<Target Name="RestorePackages">
<Exec Command=""$(ToolsHome)NuGet\NuGet.exe" restore "%(Solution.Identity)"" />
</Target>
Again, the details are in the docs (this one specifically). If you have any questions don't be afraid to reach out: the SO community is here to help!
How does TFS even know how to call nuget? Do I install the nuget exe?
No, you should enable package restore for the solution which can be done from the context menu for the solution file in the solution explorer. This will add a folder named .nuget to your solution and in this folder you will find NuGet.exe.
If you add the solution to source control and build it on a build server the NuGet.exe executable will be used by the NuGet msbuild targets to restore packages from NuGet as part of the build.
So you do not need to install NuGet on the build server - it becomes part of your project and is placed under version control.
If you set your solutions to restore NuGet packages, and then on the build server with the build account, open vs and set Allow NuGet to download missing packages during build in Visual Studio. Your builds should restore packages ok.
So the past few days i've been setting up NuGet, making packages of our internal libraries, updating our projects, getting our TFS Build server to Build. all of this is awesome! Now I have a problem though, before NuGet and package restore I could search TFS for the .dll files, as an example I could search for Company.Common.dll in TFS and find all projects that utilized this dll with the following command:
tf dir "$/*Company.common.dll" /recursive
/server:http://tfs-server:8080
Now after we have started using NuGet and using package restore the dll file Company.Common.dll will not be present in TFS in the projects that uses it. that means I can't use the above search command to find the .dll file I want to update
I was contemplating writing a powershell script that would find all packages.config files in TFS and download them to a folder structure indicating where in TFS the different projects are located. Then I would traverse the packages.config file to figure out what projects used the specific NuGet package I wanted to update.
The reason for this is ofcourse that all our projects should have the Common.dll updated when there is an update too it.
What I would like to know is if anyone has already solved this "problem", so I don't have to invent the wheel again, or perhaps have some perspective or constructive comments on this. I guess the core question is this:
How do you handle updating a package across ALL projects, when there are multiple teams that create / update projects in TFS?
One solution would be to use the "repositoryPath" NuGet config settings and make it point to a central UNC share. More details here # http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.1.
You can use NuGet.exe Update packageName -RepositoryPath xxx -Source xxx command to update the specific package if needed.
I am using GIT with a new ASP.NET MVC project. I have a line in my gitignore file to ignore dlls
*.dll
I would like to add something along the lines of the following to include (i.e. do not ignore) DLLs in my NUGET packages folder
!/packages/*.dll
The problem I'm encountering is that not all nuget packages are created equally and, depending on the package in question, DLLs may be nested an arbitrary number of levels in the path hierarchy. It seems that I simply need a recursive solution along the lines of:
!/packages/**/*.dll
!/packages/**/*
I have not yet found a solution that will work via mysysgit (or any windows distribution of git).
Does anyone know of a way to make this work???
Leave your top level gitignore alone by keeping *.dll in it.
Create another .gitignore file in the packages directory and put !*.dll in it.
Another option to consider is NOT including your NuGet dlls in your repository and instead only download them the first time you build your project. This is what we do with all of our NuGet dependencies.
UPDATE
Nuget handles this now without having to manually create your own build events. See the details on this page: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/using-nuget-without-committing-packages
Original Answer:
We put the NuGet.exe application in a tools folder under our solution, and then add the following to our project pre-build event.
"$(SolutionDir)Tools\NuGet.exe" install "$(ProjectDir)packages.config" -o "$(SolutionDir)Packages"
The first time we build the app it will download all of the dependencies, but with subsequent builds, NuGet is smart enough to see that they already exist at the correct version and skips them.