nuget package restore with MonoDevelop - monodevelop

Question

I have a solution that is primarily developed in Visual Studio 2012. I would like to develop in MonoDevelop without major incompatibilities.
Thus far, I have installed mrward's nuget addin for MonoDevelop and things work if I manually add each package in packages.config through that interface. However, this is highly onerous. This addin doesn't have support for automated package restore as of this writing.
I downloaded nuget.exe from CodePlex ("NuGet command line utility", as it's labeled). I use a simple find/xargs combination to install all required packages:
find . -name packages.config | xargs -I '{}' mono nuget.exe install '{}'
This creates several dozen directories in the directory from which it is run instead of putting things under packages/ as expected, and it also doesn't touch the project files so MonoDevelop still thinks that it should be looking for package references in the directory from which MonoDevelop was started.
I therefore opened MonoDevelop from the working directory that contains all of these package folders, and I still get invalid references. I think this is probably because the project is looking for package_name/ reference, but the folders are name package_name.version/ in the working directory.
Any suggestions for a sane, simple way to interact with this solution? I'm next going to try modifying my shell command so that it automatically drops to project/packages and runs nuget from that directory.

Answer 1

Did you try using the -o command line parameter with NuGet.exe? You can use that to get the packages to install into a particular packages folder.
The NuGet addin for MonoDevelop supports package restore from version 0.6 or above. Right click your project and select Restore Packages. This will download all the packages defined in your packages.config for all projects in the solution. It uses NuGet.exe to do this.
Another way to get this working is to use the custom NuGet MSBuild target so the package restore happens at build time when using xbuild. It would require some manual editing of project files though. Under the covers the custom MSBuild target just uses NuGet.exe with a similar command line to what you have already just with the output directory option specified. So I would try the command line approach since that will be less work.
You would have to get the following files from the NuGet repository on codeplex:
NuGet.exe
NuGet.targets
NuGet.config
Put these in a directory somewhere. Typically these are put in a .nuget directory in the same directory as your solution file. Then you need to edit your project files to include the NuGet.targets file and also define the SolutionDir property. So something like this:
<SolutionDir Condition="$(SolutionDir) == '' Or $(SolutionDir) == '*Undefined*'">..\..\</SolutionDir>
<Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets" />
You will also need to enable package restore on your machine. You can do this using the NuGet addin for MonoDevelop in the Options dialog. Under Linux this is available from the Edit menu under Preferences. Then look in the NuGet - General options and there is a checkbox for enabling package restore.
There is an example project on GitHub created by Jonathan Channon which uses package restore and works when building with xbuild inside MonoDevelop. There is also an issue on GitHub about using NuGet restore on Linux which might be helpful.
Update: 2014-05-14: NuGet addin for MonoDevelop now supports package restore.