Setting up the NuGet Development Environment

So you want to hack on NuGet? These notes will help you get your development environment set up correctly so you can work on NuGet using Visual Studio 2010.

Get and Build the code

  1. Install Git. Install Git for Windows and then optionally install TortoiseGit

  2. Clone the repository. From a command prompt, run the following command in a directory where you want the source code to be placed. This will create a folder named "nuget" with the source.

    git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/nuget
  3. If you are using VS2010 then,
    1. Download and install the Visual Studio 2010 SDK
    2. Run build.cmd from a Command Prompt
  4. If you are using VS2012 then,
    1. Uninstall the existing NuGet Extension from Visual Studio.
    2. Download and install the Visual Studio 2012 SDK
    3. Run build.cmd from a Command Prompt
  5. For more information on using GIT, you may refer to http://think-like-a-git.net/

Setup Debugging for VS2012/VS2010

To debug the console and UI during development, following these steps:

  1. Launch Visual Studio as Administrator
  2. Make sure that the NuGet Extension is UNINSTALLED from your primary instance of VS so your newly compiled one can load into the experimental instance.
  3. Set the VsExtension project as the startup project
  4. Ensure you rebuild the VsExtension project.
  5. Now you can run or debug the VsExtension project and this would launch a separate instance of VS2012/VS2010 (called the Experimental instance) with a copy of the NuGet vsix installed. What you do in this instance don't affect the main VS instance.

Developing NuGet on Linux

Developing on OpenSUSE

The easiest distribution to use is OpenSUSE. Install OpenSUSE 12.3, then follow these steps:

  1. Install Git

    sudo zypper install git

  2. Install Mono Open firefox, go to http://software.opensuse.org/find. Search package "mono-complete". In the result page, click "Show other versions". Install version 3.2.3 from repository openSUE Factory.

  3. Import Trusted Root Certificates. By default, Mono trusts no one. The NuGet build needs to install some packages from https://www.nuget.org, and without neccessary root certificates this will fail. Run this command to import trusted root certificates from Mozilla's LXR into Mono's certificate store:

    mozroots --sync --import

  4. Clone the repository 

    git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/nuget

  5. Build NuGet Cd to the nuget source code direcotry, run

    ./build.sh

    This will build NuGet.exe successfully.

Developing on Debian

To build NuGet code on Linux Mint 14.1, follow these steps:

  1. Install Git. 

    sudo apt-get install git

    The git that I got is an old version (v 1.7.10.4) that will fail to clone the NuGet repository. So I need to get the latest git source code and build it:

    sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libexpat1-dev
git clone https://github.com/git/git.git
cd git
make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

    Then run hash -r to clear bash's cache so that the new version of git will get executed by bash.

  2. Clone the repository 

    git clone https://git01.codeplex.com/nuget

  3. Build Mono. Do not use apt-get to install Mono since the installed version is 2.X, which cannot build the NuGet code successfully. Building NuGet requires Mono >= 3.2.

    1. Get the Mono 3.2.3 source code tarball from http://download.mono-project.com/sources/mono/.
    2. Unzip the tarball using tar -xjvf mono-xxx.tar.bz2.
    3. Compile and install Mono. 
      sudo apt-get install g++
cd mono-xxx
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

  4. Import Trusted Root Certificates. Import trusted root certificates from Mozilla's LXR into Mono's certificate store:

    mozroots --sync --import

  5. Build NuGet Now we can finally build NuGet. Cd to the nuget source code direcotry, run

    ./build.sh

    This will build NuGet.exe successfully.