Programmatically Determine Nuget Dependencies for a Project

I like to use Nuget pretty extensively. It is great for distributing open source libraries to the public, but it is also a great tool for managing your own code libraries, and sharing them across projects.

There are times when I cannot simply run the NuGet utility on a single project file. Sometimes, I need to create my own NuSpec file, for example if I am including the build outputs of multiple projects, and generate a package from that. At that point, it becomes important to know the landscape of your NuGet dependencies in your projects, so you can properly reference them in a NuSpec file.

The solution is really pretty simple — each project’s dependencies are stored in a file named packages.config at the root directory of the project. This configuration file contains an XML document that lists your each dependency’s ID, version, and target framework.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="Onion.SolutionParser.Parser" 
  version="1.0.0.0" targetFramework="net45" />
</packages>

So all you need to do is deserialize the XML to an object, and you can catalog your dependencies, write them into a NuSpec file, or do whatever else you need to do with them.

public class NugetPackageConfigItem
{
  [XmlAttribute("id")]
  public string Id { get; set; }

  [XmlAttribute("version")]
  public string Version { get; set; }

  [XmlAttribute("targetFramework")]
  public string TargetFramework { get; set; }
}

[XmlRoot("packages")]
public class NugetPackageConfigCollection
{
  [XmlElement("package")]
  public NugetPackageConfigItem[] Packages { get; set; }

  public static NugetPackageConfigCollection Deserialize(string path)
  {
    using (var stream = File.OpenRead(path))
    {
      var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(NugetPackageConfigCollection));
      var collection = serializer.Deserialize(stream) as NugetPackageConfigCollection;
      return collection;
    }
  }
}

Hope this tip was helpful and non-obvious. Happy coding.