NuGet Overview
What is NuGet?
A tool for any modern development platform and is a mechanism through which developers can create, share, and consume useful code. Often such code is bundled into packages that contain compiled code (as DLLs) along with other content needed in the projects that consume these packages.
- For .NET and .NET Core, the Microsoft-supported mechanism for sharing code is NuGet, which defines how packages for .NET are created, hosted, and consumed, and provides the tools for each of those roles.
- A NuGet package is a single ZIP file with the
.nupkgan extension that contains compiled code (DLLs), other files related to that code, and a descriptive manifest that includes information like the package's version number.
Workflow
- Developers with code to share create packages and publish them to a public or private host.
- Package consumers obtain those packages from suitable hosts, add them to their projects, and then call a package's functionality in their project code.
- NuGet itself then handles all of the intermediate details.
- A host serves as the point of connection between package creators and package consumers.
- Creators build useful NuGet packages and publish them to a host.
- Consumers then search for useful and compatible packages on accessible hosts, downloading and including those packages in their projects.
- Once installed in a project, the packages' APIs are available to the rest of the project code.
Managing Dependencies
One of the most powerful features of a package management system is to easily build on the work of others. NuGet also manages dependency tree or graph on behalf of a project.
- You need only concern yourself with those packages that you're directly using in a project.
- If any of those packages themselves consume other packages which can consume others packages, NuGet takes care of all those down-level dependencies.
