In my previous post I explained the steps to use Github actions to package and deploy your .nupkg to NuGet, but Github also includes support for you to deploy your package alongside your project sources.
If you take a look at the right hand of your project within Github (i.e. where you see your main README.md) you’ll notice the Packages section, if you click on the Publish your first package it tells you the steps you need to take to create and deploy your package, but it wasn’t quite that simple for me, hence this post will hopefully help others out a little if they hit similar issues.
The first thing you need to do is make sure you are using a version of the dotnet CLI that supports nuget commands (specifically the add command). Here’s a set-up step with a compatible version of dotnet CLI.
- name: Setup .NET Core
uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
with:
dotnet-version: 3.1.401
The version must be 3.1.401 or above. There may be another before this but I was using 3.1.101 and was getting the following failure in the build output
Specify --help for a list of available options and commands. error: Unrecognized command or argument 'add'
So the first command listed in Publish your first package will fail if you’re not upto date with the version of dotnet. If you’re using ubuntu instead of Windows for your builds, then you need to include the –store-password-in-clear-text on your dotnet nuget add command. Also change GH_TOKEN to ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
Hence your first command will look more like this now
dotnet nuget add source https://nuget.pkg.github.com/your_user/index.json -n github -u your_user -p ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} --store-password-in-clear-text
Replace “your_user” with your GitHub username and if you’ve created a permission that you prefer to use in place of GITHUB_TOKEN, then replace that also.
The second line shown in Publish your first package is
dotnet pack --configuration Release
Thankfully this is worked without an issue, however the Step 3 from
dotnet nuget push your_path/bin/Release/*.nupkg --skip-duplicate --api-key ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}} --source "github"
Replacing “your_path” with the path of your package to be published. Use –skip-duplicate so that any change to your code will not fail when a build is triggered, as without this option the command tries to publish an existing/unchanged package, causing a failure. Also set the –api-key as shown.
As I am already creating a package for NuGet and want to do the same for GitHub, we can condense the commands to something like
run: |
dotnet nuget add source https://nuget.pkg.github.com/your_user/index.json -n github -u your_user -p ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} --store-password-in-clear-text
dotnet nuget push your_path/bin/Release/*.nupkg --skip-duplicate --api-key ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}} --source "github"
Don’t Forget
One more thing, in your nuspec or via the Properties | Package tab for your project, ensure you add a Repository URL to your source code. The Github package will fail without this.
For example in the SDK style csproj we have
<RepositoryUrl>https://github.com/putridparrot/PutridParrot.Randomizer.git</RepositoryUrl> <RepositoryType>git</RepositoryType>
The RepositoryType is not required for this to work, just using RepositoryUrl with https://github.com/putridparrot/PutridParrot.Randomizer worked fine.
Within a nuspec the format is as follows (if I recall)
<repository type="git" url="https://github.com/putridparrot/PutridParrot.Randomizer.git" />
Finally you’ll want to add https://nuget.pkg.github.com/your_user/index.json to you nuget.config to access Github’s NuGet package management from a project using this file and you will need a permission set up to access to API to pull in your package, alternatively simply download the package from Github and set-up a local nuget repository.