Looking for an msbuild and xbuild task to fetch referenced libraries (without nuget.exe)

Question

I have an issue with creating an easy solution for my build system, based on mono.

Current situation is that I keep my referenced libraries inside the git repository, which is not good, for many obvious reasons.

What I want to achieve is something like what NuGet provides - automatically download dlls from the Web, put them in some directory and forget about them.

I want to do this at build time, so it would not require any additional actions with downloading libraries etc. The best option would be an msbuild (xbuild on mono) task, but I want it to be system independent, so the popular one, executing NuGet.exe, is out of question (consider parallel mono installations, etc.).

I've tried Pepita project, but it's... wrong. No, really, it is, it has too many design mistakes to be easy to use or repair. To make a proper configuration would require a serious rewrite of the whole project.

What I would love is a library, that would employ NuGet.Core library and be available as a task. If such a lib is not there, I could use any solution, that would download a nuget package and unpack it to a directory specified in .csproj.

Even better, it would be nice if such a library could resolve dependencies without specifying them explicitly in packages.config (or similar) file, e.g. if I want to include Castle.Windsor I don't want to include Castle.Core in my config file.

I know about the OpenWrap project (with NuGet Gallery), it looks promising, but I can't find the solution where I would just put a constant set of libraries in my repo once, modify csproj files, some configs and have it done.

Answer 1

I can tell you that OpenWrap at the core has everything built-in to do what you want. Everything you can do with the openwrap-shell is also available to be called from msbuild. So, it seems to me that you would just need to add a before build hook to call out to openwrap to perform an "update-wrap". Several months back I actually looked into doing something similar. AFAIR I actually wrote an msbuild script to call openwrap tasks, but didn't really hook them into the normal build process.

I don't know exactly what you mean with "put a constant set of libraries in your repo once"? For OpenWrap, all you need to do is maintain the "openwrap descriptor" for your project. That file contains all direct dependencies of your project (with or without restrictions on version numbers). (Indirect dependencies are pulled in automatically) Are you wondering about how you get started when you have a bunch of binary dlls to start with? I can tell you what I did. Basically, I do not use any NuGet packages, I created OpenWrap packages for everything. I also created OpenWrap packages for all our binary dependencies (some of which are open-source). This is really super simple: you fill in correct dependencies in the OpenWrap descriptor and specify that the package must only contain the given dlls. We had a bunch of binary dependencies, but once you start packaging them, it's definitely not that much work.

If you want to see an example, you can check this one: http://code.google.com/p/ppwcode/source/browse/dotnet/External/Apache.Log4Net/trunk/Apache.Log4Net.wrapdesc

That is all you have to do to package your binary dependencies. This is a package I created and we currently use it in the company where I work. I know Log4Net is probably available as a NuGet package, and I could probably use that. The advantage of creating those binary packages myself, is that I have full control over the packages, over the version numbering of the packages, over how a big project is split over several smaller packages and so on.

As an OpenWrap repo, you can use a folder on your local filesystem, or a folder on a network share. What we use, is actually a webdav repository that we mount locally on a drive (using Windows 7). This works fine for us and also allows us to specify who has read and write access to the repository.

You mention mono.... well, that might be a problem: the currently released version of OpenWrap (2.0.2) does not run on mono AFAIK. But the good news is that Sebastien Lambla has been working hard to get OpenWrap to run on mono+xbuild for the new version that is going to be released very soon: 2.0.3. No alpha/beta builds available yet, but you can build from git. (In that case you would need to build both openwrap-shell and openwrap). Sebastien Lambla, who created OpenWrap, normally keeps an eye on questions on StackOverflow and will probably be able to give you a more complete answer on the mono status.

Btw, where I work, we are using OpenWrap already for over a year. Back then we compared both NuGet and OpenWrap, and at that moment OpenWrap was way way way ahead of NuGet. Basically, to me, NuGet was not a tool for dependency management, but a tool to assist you in Visual Studio to pull in binary dependencies from a remote server (meaning: copy dll from remote server to local folder and add reference to local dll in project file). In the mean time, NuGet has been playing catch-up with OpenWrap and has added functionality that already existed in OpenWrap. There are in my opinion only 2 things that NuGet has over OpenWrap and that is integration in Visual Studio (aka overview of remotely available packages and click-click-click adding of packages) and the fact that it is maintained by Microsoft people (AFAIK). Both things are just political: it's easier to convince people with a pretty interface and microsoft support. Personally, however, I think that OpenWrap is technically superior and I think it's really a pity that it doesn't get the attention that it deserves.