NuPack - a quick walkthrough
NuPack is a free, open source, developer-focused package manager for .NET. It looks absolutely awesome, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Let’s have a look at how to use it.
To get started with NuPack, just do the following:
- Visit the NuPack web site.
- Click the download button to download the latest release.
- Double click on the downloaded file to install NuPack.
- Open any .NET solution or create a new one.
- Right-click “references”.
- Voilá! A new “Add Package Reference” context menu item exists!
I hope that you see the subtle irony. Getting NuPack up and running is a walk in the park. After completing the steps above, this is what you should see:
When you click “Add Package Reference”, a new window opens, where you can search for packages:
In the image above, I search for log4net, which is a nice logging tool for .NET. If I click the Install button, the package is downloaded and added to my project:
If we now look in the solution folder structure, NuPack has created a “packages” folder, which contains the downloaded package:
That’s it! If you need log4net in another project or solution, just repeat these
steps. Simple, huh?
Something to pay attention to, is that I noticed that the added log4net
reference points to the GAC:
Since I’d rather have a reference to a physical .dll file instead of a package reference, I just add the NuPack fetched .dll file to version control, then remove the package reference and refer to the .dll file.
Conclusion? NuPack rocks!
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