Prevent needing to add NuGet.exe to source control

Question

Some context:
I've followed the tutorial on using NuGet without committing packages with some success. After working around this NuGet issue by manually adding <RestorePackages> and a <Import ...> for the nuget.targets file things were working.

However, once I cloned the repository with Mercurial, I got the following error when building:

Unable to locate 'C:\...\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\MyProject\.nuget\nuget.exe'

This makes sense, because my ignore pattern prevented me from checking in the exe file. From this related SO question I inferred that it's not uncommon to have this file in version control (or is it?), but really I'd prefer not to commit NuGet.exe to version control if I can help it.

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Question: Is there a convenient way to prevent needing to check in NuGet.exe?

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I've tried some Google-fu, skimming the documentation, and fiddling with the NuGet.targets file, no luck so far. It seems preferable if I could just dynamically point to the NuGet.exe of the particular environment that's building the solution.

I know I could just add the exe file, but I'd prefer to know if there are other ways to handle this or know why there are no viable alternatives.

Update:
The nuget.targets file holds some relevant xml:

<!-- only (relevant) parts of the xml shown below -->
<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">false</DownloadNuGetExe>
...
<UsingTask TaskName="DownloadNuGet" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll">
    <Task>
        <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs">
        <![CDATA[
        try {
            OutputFilename = Path.GetFullPath(OutputFilename);

            Log.LogMessage("Downloading latest version of NuGet.exe...");
            WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
            webClient.DownloadFile("https://nuget.org/nuget.exe", OutputFilename);

            return true;
        }
        catch (Exception ex) {
            Log.LogErrorFromException(ex);
            return false;
        }
        ]]>
        </Code>
    </task>
</UsingTask>

I'm unfamiliar with the workings of .targets files, but this seems to be along the lines of what I'm looking for. With my cowboy-coding hat on I tried changing the false to true in the DownloadNuGetExe element, but this didn't work as expected (with or without the condition attribute).

Answer 1

Looking at that .targets file, there's another way to do this if you neither want to check NuGet.exe in, nor download it every time. The key line is this:

<NuGetExePath Condition=" '$(NuGetExePath)' == '' ">$(NuGetToolsPath)\nuget.exe</NuGetExePath>

Following the MSBuild convention of only setting properties if they haven't already been defined, this value defaults to the solution's local copy of NuGet.exe, downloading it if the DownloadNuGetExe property is true. But MSBuild properties can be overridden by environment variables.

If you already have NuGet downloaded to some central location, you can leave DownloadNuGetExe at false and define an environment variable called NUGETEXEPATH, which will be used instead.

Answer 2

Just checked: nuget.targets is an msbuild file. And you were on the right way, in:

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">false</DownloadNuGetExe>

Change the value to true:

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">true</DownloadNuGetExe>

But you must restart Visual Studio or reload the solution (see comments) after this to take effect.

Answer 3

Enable NuGet Package Restore

Right click on solution then select Enable NuGet Package Restore