CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-corenuget.net-standard
NuclearProgrammer
NuclearProgrammer

Reputation: 926

Download Nuget Packages for Offline Development/Publishing

Short Question

Is there a way to programmatically download all of the Nuget packages needed to build/publish a solution and output them into a single directory that can be moved to a local Nuget repository?

Some Background

Where I work, most development is done on an air-gapped network (no internet). On a recent project, I was able to develop on our internet-enabled network. This happens to be the first application developed on the internet-enabled network and the first ASP.NET Core app we've ever developed. The solution builds, runs, and publishes just fine on the internet-facing network. I am now trying to move the solution to the air-gapped network, but I am having issues getting all of the dependencies moved over.

At first, the solution wouldn't build because of missing ASP.NET Core nuget packages; so I copied ALL of the nuget packages from the local cache on the machine that I used to develop the application to the local Nuget repository on the air gapped network. Now the application builds, but I can't seem to publish the web project (ASP.NET Core). I'm getting 25+ errors along the lines of:

  • Unable to find package runtime.any.System.Diagnositics.Tools. No packages exist with this id in source(s)...
  • Unable to find Nicrosoft.NETCore.App with version (>= 2.1.6)...
  • Unable to find...

I'm also getting a runtime error "This page cannot be displayed" when I try to run from visual studio (using IIS Express), but I'm not sure if that's a related issue. The unit/integration tests run fine.

I could try manually downloading each nuget package from Nuget.org and moving them over to the air gapped network, but it takes hours to get things moved from one network to another. Is there anyway I can automate the retrieval of all nuget packages required to build/publish a solution so that I can make a single transfer from one network to the other instead moving what I have and waiting to see what breaks? Preferably I'd like a exe or a PowerShell script that could look at a sln file and drop all the necessary nuget packages into a specified directory.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 7018

Answers (2)

Stephen Dunne
Stephen Dunne

Reputation: 459

On your internet enabled dev env, you can browse to the root directory of your project and use: 

dotnet restore --packages .\package\

This will use the directory called 'packages' as the local cache for the solution and all nuget files will be copied to it.

You can then include the same switch in your build, to ensure that the local cache is used.

dotnet build --packages .\package\

Upvotes: 4

zivkan
zivkan

Reputation: 14991

I answered two very similar questions a few weeks ago. Have a look at these answers to see if they help

Upvotes: 1

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