You can use nuget.exe to restore your packages or with NuGet 2.7, or above, installed you can simply compile your solution in Visual Studio, which will also restore the missing packages.
For NuGet.exe you can run the following command for each project.
nuget install packages.config
Or with NuGet 2.7 you can restore all packages in the solution using the command line.
nuget restore YourSolution.sln
Both of these will pull down the packages. Your project files will not be modified however when running this command so the project should already have a reference to the NuGet packages. If this is not the case then you can use Visual Studio to install the packages.
With NuGet 2.7, and above, Visual Studio will automatically restore missing NuGet packages when you build your solution so there is no need to use NuGet.exe.
To update all the packages in your solution, first restore them, and then you can either use NuGet.exe to update the packages or from within Visual Studio you can update the packages from the Package Manager Console window, or finally you can use the Manage Packages dialog.
From the command line you can update packages in the solution to the latest version available from nuget.org.
nuget update YourSolution.sln
Note that this will not run any PowerShell scripts in any NuGet packages.
From within Visual Studio you can use the Package Manager Console to also update the packages. This has the benefit that any PowerShell scripts will be run as part of the update where as using NuGet.exe will not run them. The following command will update all packages in every project to the latest version available from nuget.org.
Update-Package
You can also restrict this down to one project.
Update-Package -Project YourProjectName
If you want to reinstall the packages to the same versions as were previously installed then you can use the -reinstall
argument with Update-Package
command.
Update-Package -reinstall
You can also restrict this down to one project.
Update-Package -reinstall -Project YourProjectName
The -reinstall
option will first uninstall and then install the package back again into a project.
Or, you can update the packages using the Manage Packages
dialog.
Updates:
- 2013/07/10 - Updated with information about nuget restore in NuGet 2.7
- 2014/07/06 - Updated with information about automatic package restore in Visual Studio and brought the answer up to date with other changes to NuGet.
- 2014/11/21 - Updated with information about
-reinstall
Best Answer
Here's the deal: We have to tell both NuGet and TFS to ignore the packages, because NuGet is trying to do source-control related stuff that it absolutely shouldn't be doing (bad form, Microsoft!). So you have to do two things.
First, add a file named
.tfignore
to the solution folder (note the lack ofs
after thetf
). Its contents should be as follows:That tells TFS to ignore your packages folder. Now, you would think that this would also ignore the
repositories.config
file. But it won't. Why? Who knows, the ways of Microsoft are strange and mysterious. Actually, I think it's part of the NuGet stuff I outline below, but if that ever gets fixed in the future and you want to keep therepositories.config
file instead of letting VS regenerate it, you should be able to use this:OK, so now thanks to our
.tfignore
file, TFS is ignoring your packages. Everything is fine, right? WRONG, because NuGet is mucking around with your source control and adding the packages to your pending changes. So now let's tell NuGet to cut it out already.Create a folder called
.nuget
in the root of your solution folder.1 Now, create a file calledNuGet.config
, and put it in this new folder2. Its contents should look like this:And now your packages should stay out of source control. Just remember to add the
NuGet.config
and.tfignore
files to source control so they never get lost.EDIT: If you're having issues, you may want to delete your packages folder, check in that change, and then go through the steps above.
ALSO EDIT: It looks like this won't happen with newer versions of Nuget. So maybe if you switch to VS/TFS 2017 this issue will clear up without jumping through the above hoops.
1. Add the folder using Source Control Explorer; right-click the solution->Add folder->.nuget
2. When I figured this out using VS 2013, I found the NuGet.config had to go in the .nuget folder. Even if you already have a NuGet.config file in the root of your solution folder (because, say, your company has an internal nuget feed). However, some in the comments have indicated that it works fine in the solution root in VS 2015. Personally, I switched to using TFS in git mode, so I can't test. Additionally, if you do have a custom feed, ensure that you have both the custom feed and nuget.org as keys in the Nuget.config file, or sometimes TFS will randomly decide it can't restore the packages.