Using Paket with MyGet feeds

Just like NuGet, Paket is a dependency manager for .NET and Mono projects. It is designed to work with NuGet packages but also enables referencing files directly from GitHub repositories and GitHub Gists.

Let's see how you can use Paket with a MyGet feed.

Downloading Paket

You will need Paket on your system, either installed globally or on a per-project basis.

To install Paket globally, download Paket from GitHub, copy it to disk and make sure it is available from the system PATH.

To install Paket per project, use NuGet. For example:

Install-Package Paket

This will download the Paket executable to the packages folder of your project.

Converting from NuGet to Paket

Since Paket uses its own mechanism for specifying dependencies, you may want to convert existing projects to make use of it. We can convert from NuGet to Paket manually or automated, using the approach outlined in the Paket documentation.

As an example, let's automatically convert from using NuGet to using Paket by running paket convert-from-nuget:

paket convert-from-nuget --force --creds-migration selective

Paket will ask if you want to migrate feed credentials and if they have to be stored encrypted or plain-text. Once finished, our packages.config file will be coverted to a paket.dependencies file which may look like this:

source https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/api/v2

nuget Antlr 3.4.1.9004
nuget bootstrap 3.0.0
nuget jQuery 1.10.2
nuget jQuery.Validation 1.11.1
nuget Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc 5.2.2
nuget Microsoft.AspNet.Razor 3.2.2
nuget Microsoft.AspNet.Web.Optimization 1.1.3
nuget Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages 3.2.2
nuget Microsoft.jQuery.Unobtrusive.Validation 3.2.2
nuget Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure 1.0.0.0
nuget Modernizr 2.6.2
nuget Newtonsoft.Json 6.0.4
nuget Respond 1.2.0
nuget WebGrease 1.5.2

You can now use Paket to restore and update NuGet packages in your project. Running paket install will perform a package restore. By running paket init-auto-restore the package restore is also injected into your Visual Studio project so it runs during build, if needed.

Using a private MyGet feed

To work with private feeds, you will have to provide Paket with credentials of some sort. In paket.dependencies, you can specify the credentials to be used for a feed.

Plain-text password:

source https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/api/v2 username: "username_here" password: "password_here"

This does, however, require checking in credentials into source control. Alternatively, you can make use of environment variables:

source https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/api/v2 username: "%MY_USERNAME%" password: "%MY_PASSWORD%"

Using this technique is interesting as it makes it possible to securely provide credentials in an environment variable on build servers like TeamCity with its build parameters or MyGet's own build services and support for environment variables.

Note: It is also possible to make use of a pre-authenticated feed URL. Do keep in mind that such URLs contain a MyGet API key and should be treated as confidential.

The Paket source will look like the following in such case: https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/auth/147fae61-95fb-4747-9e54-09debb256c99/

Adding a package from MyGet

To add a package from MyGet, all you need to do is add a source to the paket.dependencies file and specify the dependencies. Let's add https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/api/v2 as the feed and add JSON.NET as a dependency:

source https://www.myget.org/F/paket-demo/api/v2

nuget Newtonsoft.Json 6.0.4

Running paket install will install this package into your project.

Restoring packages with Paket

Paket comes with two diferent files: paket.dependencies, which specifies the dependencies for your project, and paket.lock which maintains the state of the packages that are actually installed.

To restore packages, you can either:

• Build the project in Visual Studio. Note that beforehand you should have run paket init-auto-restore once to make sure Paket is hooked into the build process.
• or run paket install.

Both will make sure Paket downloads the missing packages from paket.lock and brings your project to its desired state.

Updating packages from MyGet using Paket

When using Paket, it's really easy to determine if the packages that are installed are outdated. All you need to do is make sure the paket.dependencies file contains the version constraints that tell Paket which versions are okay to update to.

Run paket outdated to see which updates are available:

Paket version 0.22.6.0
found: paket.dependencies
Resolving packages:
    - exploring Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc 5.2.2
    - exploring Antlr 3.4.1.9004
    - exploring Microsoft.AspNet.Razor 3.2.2
    - exploring Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages 3.2.2
    - exploring Microsoft.jQuery.Unobtrusive.Validation 3.2.2
    - exploring bootstrap 3.0.0
    - exploring Modernizr 2.6.2
    - exploring jQuery.Validation 1.11.1
    - exploring jQuery 1.10.2
    - exploring WebGrease 1.5.2
    - exploring Respond 1.2.0
    - exploring Microsoft.AspNet.Web.Optimization 1.1.3
    - exploring Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure 1.0.0.0
  - fetching versions for Newtonsoft.Json
    - exploring Newtonsoft.Json 6.0.7
Outdated packages found:
  * Newtonsoft.Json 6.0.4 -> 6.0.7
3 seconds - ready.

To download and install updates, run paket update. This will update paket.lock with the latest packages installed.