Include Nuget dependencies in my build output?

ldam picture ldam · Aug 2, 2017 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

I am building a modular .NET core application that can load extensions at runtime using MEF. I have 2 projects, one is a library that I want to be able to load at runtime, then I have my main application that will do the loading.

My library project has some Nuget dependencies. In order to load my library at runtime, I need those Nuget dependencies to be available next to the library at runtime, but building using VS2017 does not include these Nuget DLLs as part of the output.

How do I get Nuget DLLs included when I build my library?

Edit: I have tried dotnet publish and dotnet pack, but both of those make me a nupkg file only containing my DLL and not the nuget DLLs I need with it. Also, I can't load a nupkg file at runtime very easily, which is why I'd like to just get the resulting assemblies themselves on their own.

For what it's worth, this is what my csproj looks like:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netcoreapp1.1</TargetFramework>
    <AssemblyName>JSON.plugin</AssemblyName>
    <IncludeBuiltProjectOutputGroup>true</IncludeBuiltProjectOutputGroup>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Composition" Version="1.0.31" />
    <PackageReference Include="Newtonsoft.Json" Version="10.0.3" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\..\BDDGen.Types\BDDGen.Types.csproj" />
  </ItemGroup>

</Project>

Answer

Martin Ullrich picture Martin Ullrich · Aug 2, 2017

In order to make the build process copy all referenced dll files from NuGet packages from the cache folder into the build output, set this property inside a <PropertyGroup>:

<CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>true</CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>