Question

I created a nuget package, and then installed it, only to find it created a directory structure I did not expect. I’d like to know what I did wrong or what I can do to achieve my intended result. The documentation says:

Files in the content folder are copied to the root of your application when the package is installed

But that is not what happened!

To clarify this question, I invoked nuget pack -BasePath staging on the following folder structure:

• staging/
  • content/
    • MyPlugin/
      • foo.txt

From there, when I executed nuget install MyPackage -o .\Target I expected the following results:

• Target/
  • MyPlugin/
    • foo.txt

Instead what I got was this:

• Target/
  • MyPlugin.1.0.1.0/
    • MyPlugin.1.0.1.0.nupkg
    • content/
      • MyPlugin/
        • foo.txt

Clearly the result differed from my expected result in two key ways:

1. I thought the installed .nupkg would be stored somewhere else – in a cache location.
2. From the documentation, I understood that content is a special folder which is used during packing, but does not get created on install.

What did I misunderstand? How can I fix this?

Please Note: I am purposely not specifying a packages.config or SolutionDirectory, because I intend for this nuget install to be executed at run-time to add plugins to an application. Perhaps I could be convinced to use a packages.config, but I don’t think that specifically is affecting the results I’m currently getting.

Answer 1

what you see is the intended behavior of the nuget.exe command line. Quoting Balliauw:

Because the NuGet command line has no context for the solution or projects you might want to target, it will limit the install operation to the extraction of the package in a specific place.
Balliauw, Maarten; Decoster, Xavier (2012-03-07). Pro NuGet (Professional Apress) (Kindle Locations 1114-1115). Apress. Kindle Edition.