NuGet/OpenWrap for Deployments and Run Time Dependency Management

Question

I fully understand what NuGet/OpenWrap were primarily made and design for and how it has been adopted and applied since it was released a while ago.

I can however see other cases to use it in yet another way. One of the things that I was thinking of draws attention to the run time dependencies.

The enterprise product suite that I'm working on basically comes with a core that consists of various services and optional modules. These modules plug right in to make specific functionality available to form unique solutions as per requirements. These unique solutions are getting deployed to remote servers inhouse, data centers, the cloud, your patio... pretty much anywhere.

Needles to say deployments of updates for bugfixes + maintenance are complicated and have to be carried out manually which have proven to be error-prone and clumsy. Especially since interface revisions and other components have to match and major deployments usually require a depolyment of each and every module.

Personally I'm not a big fan of creating installer packages (MSI, Web Installer, etc.) for every unique solution as this would get out of hand soon and doesn't scale very well.

I was wondering whether or not a package manager and custom feeds could help us streamlining this process. Maybe I'm thinking in the wrong direction and would appreciate comments and thoughts.

Answer 1

We've done that successfully. OpenWrap can simply be called to update packages into specific directories. Deploying an app is then jsut a matter of adding a new descriptor with the packages you want to see deployed, and letting openwrap do the resolve for you.

This works well especially because OpenWrap has the concept of a system repository (which is per user), which can also be redirected (in case you want to partition multiple repositories, one per application, or for testing...).

Deploying a new app is then only a matter of either adding a new folder with an associated descriptor, or adding the application straight into the system repository. Auto-update can be implemented by simply running the openwrap command-line tools in a batch job.

If you want to go one level up, you can make your application composite by leveraging the OpenWrap API, and adding / removing packages dynamically. We have runtime assembly resolving available.