I blogged recently about using OneGet to install packages from an available NuGet feed. By default OneGet’s Chocolatey provider accesses the Chocolatey community feed, but you can actually build out your own local repo to host packages on for your internal organization. One of my examples of adding the package source and installing a package from the source were done using a local repo that I had built.
Building the local repo didn’t take a lot of time and for the most part, it didn’t really involve a lot of work to get it up and running. There is is a well written blog about it, but it only covers the Visual Studio piece and nothing about the IIS installation (it will actually use IIS Express by default) as well as downloading and installing the NuGet.server package (both of which I will be doing using none other than PowerShell).
Another reason for doing this is to show just how easy it can be to do something like this. There may be better ways of doing this or more complex ways depending on the requirement, but this does achieve the goal of setting up a NuGet feed on your internal network.
Ready? Let’s get started!
A few requirements before moving forward with this installation:
- You need to be running PowerShell V5 Preview (for the OneGet Module)
- Visual Studio needs to be installed
Download and Install NuGet Server Using OneGet
Yes, we will be using the OneGet module to locate this package and install it on the local system. First let’s take a look to see what is out there for NuGet.
Find-Package -Name NuGet.vs
Now that I know there is a package available to download and install, I will just pipe this into Install-Package to put this on my system.
Find-Package -Name NuGet.vs | Install-Package -Verbose
Success! NuGet.vs has been installed and will be ready for us when we get further along with our configuration using Visual Studio.
Installing IIS and ASP.Net 4.5
Next up on our little journey is to setup the IIS server which will be hosting the feed.
Install-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server,Web-Asp-Net45 -Verbose
I installed ASP.NET 4.5 after finding that once I moved over from IIS Express that my package feed no longer worked.
Note that a reboot is not needed after installing IIS. Now that was pretty simple, right? Now we get to move on to the non-PowerShell portion and start working with Visual Studio to build out our local feed.
Use Visual Studio to Create Web Application
I am using Visual Studio 2013, so your mileage may vary on matching up my examples to what you might be seeing.
Once you have Visual Studio open, create a new project by going to File/New/Project
Make sure you select Templates/Visual C#/Web/Visual Studio 2012 and then choose ASP.NET Empty Web Application
I will give this a more useful name as well as changing the from the default location in the Visual Studio folder on my profile to another drive. Once that is done, click OK to bring up the next screen.
Add the NuGet.Server Package to the Project
In the empty project, expand the LocalRepo project and locate References. Right click on References and select Manage NuGet Packages…
First thing to do is click on Settings so we can verify that the package source we need is available.
In the settings, ensure that https://www.nget.org/api/v2 has been checked and click OK.
Now in the search bar on the right, type NuGet.Server and wait for the package to display. Click Install to begin the installation.
Accept the license (if applicable)
Wait for it to complete the installation.
You can also verify if the installation was successful via the Output box in Visual Studio at the bottom.
Configure your packages
We can also see that there are a lot more things now under the localrepo project as well. The main piece that we are concerned about is the Web.config file. Let’s go ahead and open that up.
In the AppSettings portion of the Web.config file, look for a setting called packagesPath. This is where we can specify a different location (Default is the path of your project) for our packages if we wanted to host them on a different drive/location.
I am doing to adjust my location just a bit to keep it outside of this instance.
This is now going to be your location to drop any NuGet package (.nupkg) files off so they can be found by OneGet.
I am going to throw a couple of the packages that I downloaded and installed via OneGet to this location,. Building a package is beyond the scope of this article, but if you wanted to give it a shot, then the following link should have all of the information that you need: https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/CreatePackages
I’ll just use PowerShell to copy the existing packages over to my own local repository.
Get-ChildItem C:\Chocolatey\lib\ -Recurse -Filter *.nupkg | Copy-Item -Destination D:\Packages -Verbose
If you want to build your own packages, the following link should get you on your journey: https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/CreatePackages
Complete the Build
Ok, I have installed the NuGet server, configured and added some packages to my repository. All I really have left to do is to decide how this is going to be hosted. By default, this will use IIS Express, but I want to use my own IIS instance that I installed earlier to be the host for my feed.
We will need to get into the settings and make this change. Right click on the localrepo and select properties.
Select Web and take note of the Servers section. Here is where you choose how it will be hosted (IIS Express, IIS or External Host) as well as defining a url and creating a virtual folder on the IIS server.
I’ve made my changes and clicked the Create Virtual Directory button to add this to my IIS server.
Now I can right click on localrepo and select Build.
Based on the Output Window, it appears that the build was successful!
Testing the Site
I can type in the url that I specified in Internet Explorer (or any browser of your choosing) and I should get a webpage that says I am running a NuGet.Server instance.
I can go to the packages link and see what is already there waiting for me.
Ok, that is nice and all, but we are really doing this for the sake of OneGet, right? Let’s add the package source of our new local feed. Note that I am not using the packages portion of the url that I used on Internet Explorer.
Add-PackageSource -Name LocalRepo ` -Location http://xorp-ms-1/LocalRepo/nuget ` -Provider Chocolatey -Trusted -Verbose
Ok, it is there, so let’s really verify everything works (at the time of this blog there is no verification check of the location when using Add-Package).
Find-Package -Source localrepo
We can see all of the packages that I copied over are available on my local repository. The final test of this is to actually download and install a package. Before I do that, let’s take a look at what is actually installed vs. what is available on the local repository.
Looks like I will be downloading and installation dotPeek and sysinternals.
Find-Package -Source localrepo -Name dotPeek,sysinternals | Install-Package -Verbose
Once it has finished, we just need to verify that the package has been installed.
Perfect! I now have a working NuGet server hosting some packages in my internal environment that I can use.
Filed under: powershell Tagged: chocolatey, localrepo, nuget, OneGet, Powershell
