(Above: Some cool-looking circuits that feature on the NuGet website)

Hey! After a large amount of research, I've finally figured out how to create a simple NuGet package. Since I ended up using TeleConsole in a recent ACW and it doesn't have any dependencies (making packaging easier!), I decided to use it to test the system.

I think it's turned out rather well actually - you can find it on NuGet here.

Since it's been such a complicated process, rather than talking about TeleConsole itself, I'd like to give a sort-of tutorial on how I did it instead (if you'd like to read more about TeleConsole, I posted about it when I first released it here).

To start with, you'll need to install NuGet. Once done, the next step is to create a .nuspec file for your project. It goes in the same directory as the .csproj file for the project you want to publish on NuGet. I haven't yet figured out how to reference another project in the same solution and have it work with NuGet, but I should imagine it's mostly automatic. Here's the .nuspec file for TeleConsole:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package>
  <metadata>
    <id>TeleConsoleClient</id>
    <version>0.3</version>
    <title>$title$</title>
    <authors>Starbeamrainbowlabs</authors>
    <owners>Starbeamrainbowlabs</owners>
    <licenseUrl>https://gitlab.com/sbrl/TeleConsole/blob/master/LICENSE</licenseUrl>
    <projectUrl>https://gitlab.com/sbrl/TeleConsole/</projectUrl>
    <iconUrl>https://gitlab.com/sbrl/TeleConsole/blob/master/logo.png?raw=true</iconUrl>
    <requireLicenseAcceptance>false</requireLicenseAcceptance>
    <description>$description$</description>
    <releaseNotes>Initial nuget release.</releaseNotes>
    <copyright>Copyright 2017</copyright>
    <tags>Debugging Networking Console Remote</tags>
  </metadata>
</package>

As you can see, it's actually a fairly simple format - based on XML of course, since C♯ seems to love it for some reason. The bits in $ signs are special - they are references to the corresponding values in the .csproj file. You can do it for <version> too - but I was experiencing issues with it not picking this up correctly, so I'm specifying it manually. More information about this can be found on the Microsoft website - links are available at the bottom of this post.

With that done, the next step is to package it into a `.nupkg file 0 which is basically just a renamed .zip file with a specific structure. The nuget command-line application has the ability to do this for us - but doesn't work on Linux without an extra argument (thanks to @ArtOfSettling on GitHub for discovering this!):

nuget pack -MsbuildPath /usr/lib/mono/msbuild/15.0/bin/

...Windows users don't need to include the -MsbuildPath /usr/lib/mono/msbuild/15.0/bin/ bit. This command will output a .nupkg file, which you can then upload to nuget.org here, once you're signed in.

Sources and Further Reading

• Creating NuGet packages by Microsoft
• .nuspec reference
• TeleConsole-Client's nuspec file on GitLab