Creating and publishing a simple NuGet package

I publish my first NuGet package the other day, and I figured I’d do a short write-up of the steps involved. It’s actually really easy, there are no difficult technical challenges to overcome here, nor are there challenges of any kind. So, this post is mainly meant as just a quick reference for myself, in case I decide to publish more stuff in the future.

Prerequisites

Number one: get a NuGet account, if you don’t already have one. You’ll also need the NuGet command line tool, which you can get here. Put the .exe in your PATH somewhere, or just stick it in the project folder that you want to publish (next to the .csproj file).

Creating the package

Open a command prompt in the project folder that you want to publish, and call

> nuget spec

This will create the .nuspec file, and fill it with some defaults. The .nuspec file is an Xml file containing package metadata. It can contain hard-coded values, as well as tokens that will be replaced during package creation. For an overview of the replacement tokens, see the NuGet docs. My .nuspec file ended up looking like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package>
    <metadata>
        <id>$id$</id>
        <version>$version$</version>
        <title>$title$</title>
        <authors>$author$</authors>
        <owners>b-w</owners>
        <licenseUrl>https://github.com/b-w/Blazer/blob/master/LICENSE.txt</licenseUrl>
        <projectUrl>https://github.com/b-w/Blazer</projectUrl>
        <requireLicenseAcceptance>true</requireLicenseAcceptance>
        <description>$description$</description>
        <copyright>$copyright$</copyright>
        <tags>SQL ADO.NET data-access ORM micro-ORM object-mapper</tags>
    </metadata>
</package>

The owner tag contains my NuGet account name. I also entered project- and license URLs, and some relevant tags. The remaining values come from my project’s assembly information. I changed the assembly properties to use fixed versioning, instead of having the build- and revision numbers autogenerate.

After creating the .nuspec file, I built the project in release mode from Visual Studio. I then called

> nuget pack Blazer.csproj -properties Configuration=Release

This generates the .nupkg file. This file is then uploaded to the NuGet gallery, and we’re done. That’s all it takes to publish a NuGet package.