First introduced in 2010, NuGet has been around for a few years now and many people and organizations are starting to realize that NuGet presents a great opportunity to improve and automate parts of the development processes. Whether you work on open source projects or in an enterprise environment, NuGet is here to stay, but you have a way bigger NuGet ecosystem at your disposal today.
Because the NuGet project is open source under a permissive Apache v2 license, other projects can leverage NuGet and companies can build support for it in their products. All of them extend the NuGet ecosystem to what it is today.
It is great to see how NuGet adoption is growing, especially when people come up with innovative ideas that facilitate our work even further. And if any of you has a way to improve the NuGet tools, whether the Outercurve, Microsoft or any other NuGet-based product, then please tell them about your ideas. Report defects, log feature requests, provide feedback, write documentation or submit a pull request and experience eternal gratitude from an entire community.
The NuGet project provides a free, open source package management system for .NET and consists out of a few client tools (NuGet Command Line and NuGet Visual Studio Extension) and the official NuGet Gallery hosted at http://www.nuget.org. Combined, these tools and the gallery form the NuGet project, governed by Outercurve Foundation and part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery.
The sources for the Outercurve NuGet clients can be found on Codeplex, while the NuGet Gallery sources are available on GitHub.
Most NuGet client tools are based on the cross-platform NuGet.Core project. If you want to build your own NuGet client, your best bet is to fetch the NuGet.Core project's sources from Codeplex, or to run the following command in the Package Manager Console to install the NuGet.Core package:
Install-Package NuGet.Core
This is a command line wrapper around NuGet.Core.
More info: NuGet Command Line Reference
To create a basic NuGet server and point it to a local folder or network share, create a new ASP.NET application and run the following command in the Package Manager Console to install the NuGet.Server package:
Install-Package NuGet.Server
More info: Install the NuGet.Server package
Benefits:
Drawbacks:
The official NuGet Gallery is hosted at http://www.nuget.org. Availability info: http://status.nuget.org/ Statistics: http://www.nuget.org/stats
To set up your own NuGet Gallery, fetch the sources from GitHub and follow the instructions at https://github.com/NuGet/NuGetGallery.
Benefits:
Drawbacks:
NuGet Concierge is a package recommendation service: upload a packages.config file and NuGet Concierge will recommend you packages you may find useful.
More info: http://blog.nuget.org/20130816/introducung-nuget-concierge.html
Microsoft has extensively contributed to the development of the NuGet project. All contributions made by Microsoft employees are also open source and are donated (including copyrights) to the Outercurve Foundation.
You can download this Visual Studio extension using the Visual Studio Extension Manager or directly from the Visual Studio Gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4ec1526c-4a8c-4a84-b702-b21a8f5293ca.
More info:
You can download this Visual Studio extension using the Visual Studio Extension Manager or directly from the Visual Studio Gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c.
More info:
WebMatrix 3 also has a NuGet Package Manager Extension which you can download using the built-in extension manager or directly from the WebMatrix Extensions Gallery at http://extensions.webmatrix.com/packages/NuGetPackageManager/.
One of the developers of the core NuGet team at Microsoft, Luan Nguyen, created a great graphical tool to work with NuGet packages. The GUI allows you to very easily create, publish, download and inspect NuGet packages and their metadata.
MyGet is a NuGet server that allows you to create and host your own NuGet feeds. It is hosted on Windows Azure and has a freemium offering, meaning you can use it for free (within the constrains of the free plan) or subscribe to one of the paying plans if you require more resources or features. More info at https://www.myget.org.
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Chocolatey.org is a system-level package manager for Windows based on NuGet, allowing you to search and install software components on your system, even unattended. Looks very promising and definitely something to keep an eye on!
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OctopusDeploy is a convention-based automated deployment solution using NuGet as a protocol. You can use the Community edition for free (limited to 1 project) or buy one of the paying editions.
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RedGate's Deployment Manager is a custom fork of the OctopusDeploy project. History separates shortly after v1.0 of OctopusDeploy, as explained in this post: http://octopusdeploy.com/support/red-gate
More info: http://www.red-gate.com/delivery/deployment-manager/
SymbolSource is a hosted symbolserver that integrates with NuGet and is configurable in Visual Studio, allowing you to debug NuGet packages by downloading the symbols and sources on-demand.
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The CoApp project originally aimed to create a vibrant Open Source ecosystem on Windows by providing the technologies needed to build a complete community-driven Package Management System, along with tools to enable developers to take advantage of features of the Windows platform.
The project has pivoted to mesh with the NuGet project and the collaborative result is visible in NuGet 2.5 where support for native packages was first introduced. The CoApp project is still building additional tools to enhance C/C++ support in NuGet.
ProGet is an on-premise NuGet server with a freemium model that also provides integration with the Inedo BuildMaster product.
Provides:
BoxStarter is another cool project leveraging NuGet and Chocolatey to quickly set up development environments.
More info: http://boxstarter.codeplex.com/documentation
SharpDevelop was amongst the first IDEs other than Visual Studio to support NuGet.
More info: http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/mattward/archive/2011/01/23/NuGetSupportInSharpDevelop.aspx
Xamarin Studio and MonoDevelop also have a NuGet extension, built on top of a custom build of the NuGet.Core.dll and a custom build of Microsoft's XML Document Transformation (XDT) library.
More info: https://github.com/mrward/monodevelop-nuget-addin
As of v8.0 of ReSharper, the built-in extension manager allows you to fetch ReSharper plug-in packages from a custom NuGet Gallery hosted at https://resharper-plugins.jetbrains.com.
TeamCity has a few build steps specifically designed to deal with NuGet package consumption, creation and publication. In addition, it also comes with a built-in NuGet feed collecting all packages produced in your build artifacts.
More info: http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2011/08/native-nuget-support-in-teamcity/
Artifactory is a repository manager with built-in support for various artifacts, including NuGet packages.
More info: http://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/NuGet+Repositories
Nexus is another repository manager with built-in support for NuGet and they even provide a "What is NuGet for Java Developers" on their blog.
More info: http://books.sonatype.com/nexus-book/reference/nuget.html
There are quite a few other tools and utilities building further on top of NuGet. Here's a list of what I've found interesting:
Using a new tool or technology usually comes with a learning curve. Luckily for you, NuGet has no steap learning curve it all! In fact, anyone can get started consuming packages in no time. Authoring packages however, and especially authoring good packages, as well as embracing NuGet in your automated build and deployment processes requires some research in order to get things right.
The following pointers should help you get the maximum out of NuGet:
If you have a NuGet ecosystem project that would be a valuable addition to this page, please feel free to submit a pull request with an edit to this page.