Play with Packages, programmatically!

ranjinimathrubootham

May 20th, 20130 1

One of the many often seen requests, from developers using NuGet, is examples on our NuGet core APIs. The requests range from finding meta-data for the packages to installing the package programmatically. In this blog post, I will provide a few examples of using NuGet Core APIs.

Getting Started

To use NuGet Core APIs, install NuGet.Core NuGet package in your project and add NuGet namespace to your using statements.

Get me the pre-released versions of a package

Let’s say you would like to get the list of all pre-released versions of EntityFramework package. Below is the code snippet that would get you the list using NuGet API v2.

//ID of the package to be looked up 
string packageID = "EntityFramework"; 

//Connect to the official package repository 
IPackageRepository repo = PackageRepositoryFactory.Default.CreateRepository("https://packages.nuget.org/api/v2"); 

//Get the list of all NuGet packages with ID 'EntityFramework' 
List<IPackage> packages = repo.FindPackagesById(packageID).ToList(); 

//Filter the list of packages that are not Release (Stable) versions 
packages = packages.Where (item => (item.IsReleaseVersion() == false)).ToList(); 
//Iterate through the list and print the full name of the pre-release packages to console 
foreach (IPackage p in packages) 
{ 
  Console.WriteLine(p.GetFullName()); 
}

Help me get a package

Let’s say you would like to programmatically download and unzip a package in the path you want. Below is the code snippet that you would use to download and unzip the package in the path specified. The example below downloads and unzips EntityFramework 5.0.0 to one of my projects.

//ID of the package to be looked 
up string packageID = "EntityFramework"; 

//Connect to the official package repository IPackageRepository
repo = PackageRepositoryFactory.Default.CreateRepository("https://packages.nuget.org/api/v2"); 

//Initialize the package manager string path = <PATH_TO_WHERE_THE_PACKAGES_SHOULD_BE_INSTALLED>
PackageManager packageManager = new PackageManager(repo, path); 

//Download and unzip the package 
packageManager.InstallPackage(packageID, SemanticVersion.Parse("5.0.0"));

It’s quite easy, have fun!

As illustrated by the above examples, trying to work with NuGet packages programmatically is quite easy. Start exploring them today!

-Ranjini