How can I use nuget package manager outside of Visual Studio to install / update a package from the command line?

Question

I work with a microservice architecture with basic code that is used in conjunction with the nuget package. All this works very well, except on rare occasions when I need to update one of my core nuget packages and then upgrade 10+ solutions to the latest version. With a visual studio that always loads, I don't want to go in and open each one to run the Update-Package command from the nuget package manager.

I studied using the nuget.exe command line, but the installation option only downloads the package, and does not install it in my project. I tried to find how to run the package manager outside of the visual studio, but the closest was this post two and a half years ago, saying this on a roadmap with an outdated link. I am also not familiar with how update requests work on this site.

Does anyone know if there is any nuget feature I just missed? If anyone does not know about any alternative ways to update the nuget package for several solutions without having to wait through the horrific loading times of Visual Studio every time?

Answer 1

I ended up writing a quick powershell script file to solve my problem. Here everyone is interested:

param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]$package, $solution = (Get-Item *.sln), $nuget = "nuget.exe" ) & $nuget update "$solution" -Id "$package" $sln = Get-Content $solution [regex]$regex = 'Project\("{.*?}"\) = ".*?", "(.*?\.csproj)", "{.*?}"' $csprojs = $sln | Select-String $regex -AllMatches | % {$_.Matches} | % {$_.Groups[1].Value} Foreach ($csproj_path in $csprojs) { $csproj_path = Get-Item $csproj_path Write-Host "Updating csproj: $csproj_path" [xml]$csproj = Get-Content $csproj_path Push-Location (Get-Item $csproj_path).Directory $reference = $csproj.Project.ItemGroup.Reference | ? {$_.Include -like "$package,*"} $old_include = [string]$reference.Include $old_hintpath = [string]$reference.HintPath $old_version = $old_include | Select-String 'Version=([\d\.]+?),' | % {$_.Matches} | % {$_.Groups[1].Value} $all_packages = Get-ChildItem $old_hintpath.Substring(0, $old_hintpath.IndexOf($package)) $new_package_dir = $all_packages | ? {$_.Name -like "$package.[0-9.]*"} | ? {$_.Name -notlike "$package.$old_version"} | Select -First 1 $new_version = $new_package_dir | Select-String "$package.([\d\.]+)" | % {$_.Matches} | % {$_.Groups[1].Value} $dll = Get-ChildItem -Path $new_package_dir.FullName -Recurse -Include *.dll | Select -First 1 $reference.HintPath = [string](Get-Item $dll.FullName | Resolve-Path -Relative) $reference.Include = $reference.Include.Replace("Version=$old_version","Version=$new_version") Pop-Location $csproj.Save($csproj_path) }