Easily publish a NuGet package

I recently published WebAPI.Testing on Nuget but found it a bit tricky to build a package ready for NuGet.

There is documentation about how to do it but I found it hard to follow so I thought I’d document how I finally got my package ready.

The easiest way I thought was to have something built into Visual Studio. I spoke to David Fowler and he told me you can edit your *.csproj file and add <BuildPackage>true</BuildPackage> to it.

When you build your project a *.nupkg is created ready for publishing with NuGet.

However if you have no AssemblyInfo.cs or *.nuspec file then that package won’t contain anything that useful about your package.

So the easiest thing to do is amend your AssemblyInfo.cs file with information about your package if you have an AssemblyInfo.cs file. If you don’t have one its not a problem.

Build your project, open the *.nupkg file that was created with Nuget Package Explorer and edit the metadata adding any extra information you want about your project.

Note: If your solution has NuGet restore turned on the build will pick up the dependencies required for your project. Cool eh!

Click File – Save Metadata As, and save the *.nuspec file into the same place as your *.csproj file.

Go to Visual Studio and include this *.nuspec file in your project. Open it and remove the <files></files> node unless you are including other specific files with your package. I found it created a node that pointed to /lib/net45/myProject.dll which was unnecessary and resulted in my project not compiling.

In the future you can edit this *.nuspec file for example when you have a new version and when you build your project it will create a nice new *.nupkg file based on the information provided in the *.nuspec file.

Then go to nuget.org and register/logon and upload your *.nupkg file