So you’ve developed code. Great! Now you have to publish it to your users. But how There are many ways to accomplish this but one of the most used is NuGet. NuGet is a technology that allows you to publish code in the form of packages for others.

NuGet Introduction

NuGet has become popular mostly due to its widespread adoption as a package manager and its integration with Microsoft’s developer tools. NuGet allows developers to bundle code into packages which can then be easily distributed for others to use.

NuGet has two main components; a client and server. A NuGet server hosts a repository which then contains packages for distribution. The NuGet client is a client-based component that is used to create local packages and upload to server repositories. Various clients then download these packages over HTTP/HTTPS.

PowerShell Repositories (PSRepositories)

A popular use of a NuGet server is as a PSRepository. A PSRepository is just a fancy name for a NuGet repository that hosts PowerShell code.

A PSRepository allows you to publish and install PowerShell modules and code straight from built-in commands, such as Publish-Module and Install-Module . You can see all of the commands included for use with NuGet by enumerating all commands in the PowerShellGet module with Get-Command -Module PowerShellGet .

Microsoft hosts their own public NuGet repository called the PowerShell Gallery which is available to the world. But many organizations would rather host their repository locally to integrate with company-specific information or services like Active Directory, for example.

Note that although the NuGet technology is language-agnostic, I will be covering how to leverage NuGet repositories with PowerShell throughout this article.

Setting up NuGet.Server with IIS

Let’s start out with the a plain, vanilla version of NuGet.Server. NuGet.Server is the basis of all of the other NuGet products you’ll be learning about here. It’s important to first learn about NuGet.Server and how to set it up before diving into other alternatives.

By setting up plain ol’ NuGet.Server with IIS will give you a lot of background knowledge about how the other NuGet server products behave.

In this section, you’re going to learn how to set up NuGet.Server on IIS from scratch ending up with a fully-configured NuGet.Server instance.

Prerequisites

Before we get too far, you’re going to need a few things to get NuGet.Server set up.

Visual Studio – 2017 or newer is preferred and the Community Edition will work. This can be installed on a workstation and does not need to be installed on the server.

ASP.NET and web development workload for Visual Studio.

Windows Server – Any currently supported version of Windows Server version will work, but all of the screenshots have been taken on Windows Server 2019 Standard.

Note that you do not need NuGet.Server itself upfront. You are not required to manually download this ahead of time because it will be installed using the NuGet package manager integrated into Visual Studio.

Creating a Visual Studio Project

To get started creating a NuGet.Server, you’ll need to first create a project in Visual Studio. To do so, create a new project in Visual Studio with the ASP.Web Application (Visual C#) template as shown below.

You can name the app whatever you want except for NuGet.Server. If you name your app NuGet.Server, it will cause a name conflict with the package that you will download later causing headaches down the road.

Creating an ASP.NET Web Application in Visual Studio

Next, select the empty template. This will create an empty web app, which you will use to install the NuGet.Server package into. To do this, right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages as shown below.

Manage NuGet Packages

On the window that opens, search for NuGet.Server and select the version you want to install. Once selected, Visual Studio will start to download and install the dependencies into the project.

Once that is done, change the project from Debug to Release so that the final server does not include the debug logging.

Setting the Visual Studio project to Release

Next, build the project by clicking on the Build tab and selecting Build Solution.

Building NuGet.Server project

If you left the repo location as default, the application will be built at C:\Users\<username>\source\repos\<AppName>\<AppName>. The folder will look something like what is shown below. You will need this project folder to copy to your web server.

NuGetServerApp project directory

If you’re unsure of where your project folder is at, you can always see it in your properties for the project.

Visual Studio project folder location

Installing IIS

Next, install the Windows features NuGet.Server requires on the server. To install all the needed roles on your server, launch an administrative PowerShell session and run the Install-WindowsFeature cmdlet with all of the necessary features as shown below.

Install-WindowsFeature Web-Server,Web-Net-Ext45,Web-Asp-Net45,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-ISAPI-Ext -IncludeManagementTools

Once the IIS role and other features are installed, copy over the project folder (probably C:\Users\<username>\source\repos\<AppName>\<AppName>) to a directory on your web server. The default location for web apps is C:\inetpub\wwwroot. This is the directory I will be assuming your project is in.

Prepping the Web Config

Next, you’ll need to inspect the web.config file on the web server. This file will be in the root of the build folder you copied to your web server. Open the web.config file with your favorite text editor. You will see two similar lines that start look like the following:

<compilation debug="true" targetFramework="<version>" />

For example, see below.

web.config file

Remove one of the compilation lines and leave the one with the newer version.

Note: If you fail to do this, you will receive an internal server error message when you launch your webpage.

Configuring IIS

Now that you have the NuGet.Server files on your web server, open IIS manager, right-click on the default web site and select New Application as shown below.

Adding an IIS application

Provide a name for the application. You can see an example of what you’ll be looking at below.

Adding an IIS application

Now if you navigate to your web server URL you should see something like below.

NuGet.Server packages page

Take note of the package URI on the page. In the above example, it is http://172.16.8.132/NuGet/nuget. You will need this for later.

Changing the Packages Directory

By default, packages are stored in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\<AppName>\Packages. If you’d rather change that location, you can do so in the web.config file.

You can also map the package folder to another path. This could be used when you have a small drive that you have the web server files on, but you have another drive that is larger for containing the packages. To change the package path change the packagesPath value in the web.config.

Once you are done making your changes to the web.config file, restart the website to load the new settings. To do this, from IIS Manager, right-click on the website and select Manage Website and then on Restart as shown below.

Restarting NuGet.Server in IIS

Setting an API Key in web.config

Take a look at the web.config file snippet below. By default, the API key is blank. That’s a problem.

API key in web.config file

If you’d like to password protect your NuGet packages, you can add an API key here. When an API key is added, you will be required to use this every time you need to add or delete packages from the repository.

Once the key is added to the value for apiKey save the file. You can instead change the value for requireApiKey to false to not need an API key to add or delete packages.

Publishing your First NuGet Package

At this point, NuGet.Server is set up and ready to go. You can now create and publish NuGet packages at will using your favorite method. For this article, I’ll use PowerShell.

To publish NuGet packages to a repository with PowerShell, you’ll need to first register a new PSRepository. To do that, use the Register-PSRepository command. You can see an example below on how to do that.

Do you remember the package URI mentioned above? Hint: for this demo it was http://172.16.8.132/NuGet/nuget.

Register-PSRepository -Name InternalNuGet -SourceLocation <PublicationURL> -PublishLocation <PublicationURL> -InstallationPolicy Trusted

Setting Package Folder Permissions

A common error you’ll see when publishing your first NuGet package is an HTTP 406 error. This error caused by the IIS application pool used by the NuGet website not having permissions to the packages folder. To fix this add the IIS_IUSRS group account to have Modify rights to the Packages folder as shown below. These permissions will allow the webpage to be able to write and edit the NuGet package files.

Setting permissions on the NuGet packages folder

Once you publish your first package, you will see the nupkg file in your Packages directory.

Updating NuGet.Server

Now you have your NuGet.Server set up, what’s next? NuGet.Server is an active project and has frequent updates that you will want to take advantage of.

To update a NuGet.Server, open your previous project. This is the same path where your project is built that you located earlier. Or if you open Visual Studio, it may be listed in your recent projects.

Once it is opened right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages. From here you can see all the packages that have updates. Select NuGet.Server and click update as shown below.

Updating NuGet.Server in Visual Studio

This will update NuGet.Server and all the dependencies that require updates. It’s that easy!

Setting up a NuGet.Server Wrapper on IIS

While setting up a NuGet.Server from scratch is not too involved, it can take a while for someone new to Visual Studio and IIS. A way to speed up the setup and update process is with a wrapper. One of the most popular wrappers, called nuget-server, is one written by svenkle and can be found on their Github page.

One of the major differences with using this wrapper instead of manually installing the web server is that it uses IIS Express. You can read more about the differences on Microsoft’s website.

There are two important differences between setting up a vanilla NuGet.Server and with this wrapper are:

you must create a Windows service to start the web server

you cannot use the IIS Manager for the configuration

The primary downside to using a wrapper to install NuGet.Server is that you cannot easily update the version until the wrapper is updated.

Prerequisites

If you’d like to learn how to set up this NuGet.Server wrapper, you’ll first need to ensure you’ve got the following:

Installer for svenkle’s NuGet.Server wrapper

Windows Server – Any currently supported version of Windows Server version will work, but all of the screenshots have been taken on Windows Server 2019 Standard

Installing the Web Server Service

The first step is creating a new Windows service. Since this NuGet.Server wrapper doesn’t use IIS, you can’t piggyback onto IIS.

With the NuGetServer.zip file downloaded from the releases page, unzip the file to your directory of choice on the web server. Once unzipped, create the Windows service to automatically start the web page when you start the server. Below you will find a PowerShell command to do that for you.

New-Service -Name NuGetServer -BinaryPathName '<UnzipPath>\Svenkle.NuGetServer.Service.exe' -StartupType Automatic Start-Service -Name NuGetServer

Customizing the Web Server

Now that you have the NuGet.Server installed from the wrapper and the service is created and started, it’s time to customize the web.config file. You can make the same changes that you would make to the web.config file with the manual deployment if you wish.

The web.config file is located in the <UnzipPath>\Host\Website folder. The major difference with this deployment is it uses port 8080 instead of the default HTTP port 80. This means that anywhere where you would have used the web URL, you have to append :8080, such as when going to the web page it would be http://localhost:8080/nuget.

All done. That was a lot easier than using Visual Studio!

Setting up BaGet on IIS

While you have been looking at only stock versions of NuGet.Server so far, there are plenty of other available versions out there. One popular option is an open-source project called BaGet.

Let’s see what it takes to get BaGet installed and running on a Windows Server with IIS.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, ensure you meet a few prerequisites.

BaGet.zip – At the time of writing this the project is still in pre-release and I am using v0.1.77

.NET Core Runtime & Hosting Bundle – This will need to be downloaded and available on the web server for later.

Windows Server – Any currently supported version of Windows Server version will work, but all of the screenshots have been taken on Windows Server 2019 Standard

Installing Web Server Prerequisites

While the below steps can be run on Linux with .NET Core or in a Docker image, these instructions will be used to install BaGet on a Windows server. This way you can take advantage of IIS to start and stop your server.

Install IIS

Since BaGet runs on .NET Core, there aren’t as many requirements as the basic NuGet.Server that you installed IIS for before. You only need a default IIS web server and the IIS manager. To install these, open a PowerShell session on your web server and run:

Install-WindowsFeature Web-Server -IncludeManagementTools

Install .NET Core

Next, install the .NET Core bundle on the web server. To do this, run the exe file you downloaded earlier. You can leave all of the options as default for this install.

The .NET Core bundle must be installed after IIS is installed. If this does not happen in the correct order, you will have to rerun the installer for the .NET Core bundle and select repair to add the missing requirements for a web app.

Now that you have the web server components ready, unzip the BaGet.zip file downloaded earlier and place it in the C:\inetpub\wwwroot folder on your web server.

Configuring the Web Server Application

Similar to NuGet.Server, you’ll need to set up a few IIS components to get BaGet up and running.

Creating the BaGet IIS Application Pool

Open IIS Manager on the web server and go to the Application Pools. Create a new application pool for BaGet since it will not be using .NET managed code. You can name it what you would like. Below is how it should look.

Creating a BaGet application pool

Creating the BaGet Website

Once the application pool is created, create the website. Since BeGet uses a non-standard HTTP port and non-default app pool, it is easiest to create a separate website from the Default Web Site. To do this, right-click on the Sites folder in IIS manager and select Add Website.

Below are the settings you need to configure BaGet.

Creating a BaGet IIS Website

Once you have the site configured it should start automatically. You can take a look at it by going to http://localhost:5000/ from your server.

BaGet packages web page

You will notice that there is more of a user interface on the BaGet webpage compared to the standard NuGet.Server webpage. In BaGet, you can easily search for packages that have been uploaded and it also provides the commands on how to upload in a variety of ways instead of using the NuGet command-line options.

Customizing the BaGet Web Server

Recall that you were able to customize your NuGet.Server server using the web.config file. But BaGet does not use the web.config file. Instead, since BaGet can also used on Linux, the developers opted for a more cross-platform format with a JSON file called appsettings.json. It is located in the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\BaGet folder.

Note that because BaGet uses .NET Core for cross-platform functionality, all paths use forward slashes.

For example, if you wanted to have your package path at C:\Packages on your server, you ‘d need to have what is shown below in the appsettings.json file.

"Storage": { "Type": "FileSystem", "Path": "C://Packages" }

BaGet API Key

To protect your NuGet server from unauthorized users from publishing or deleting package, you will still want to set an API key. The API key setting is also located in the appsettings.json, so you can set it while you are there.

Since I’m using PowerShell to manage my NuGet packages, I again can register a PSRepository. For BaGet, navigate to the webpage that you created. The webpage will give you the command to run in your PowerShell session. For example:

Register-PSRepository -Name "BaGet" -SourceLocation "http://<WebServer>:5000/v3/index.json" -PublishLocation "http://<WebServer>:5000/api/v2/package" -InstallationPolicy "Trusted"

Understanding BaGet Forks (LiGet)

While BaGet does provide many options for use, there are other forks of BaGet that have been created to specialize in other areas of NuGet. One of the most popular forks is LiGet. LiGet is different because it specializes with a Linux-first point of view.

LiGet is a fork off of the original project for BaGet. There were a few reasons the developers decided to do this, but primarily it was done to focus on some specific features of NuGet including the v3 feed support. V3 feed support does not affect the use case with PowerShell. But if you are going to be hosting a NuGet server for other use cases, you may enjoy the added functionality.

LiGet’s Hashed API Key

One major difference with LiGet vs. BaGet is the use of a hashed API key instead of plain text. With a plain text key someone with access to the web.config file on NuGet.Server or the appsettings.json on BaGet could publish to the server. This couldn’t happen with LiGet.

To get LiGet up and running, you’ll need to create a hashed API key and place it into the appsettings.json file in the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\LiGet folder.

To create the hash, you can use PowerShell or any other hashing method you’re comfortable with. Below is an example of what you would run on your workstation to create a hash.

([System.Security.Cryptography.HashAlgorithm]::Create('SHA256').ComputeHash([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes(<apikey>)) | Foreach-Object { $_.ToString('x2')}) -join ''

You can also use an online hash generator to create the hash.

The drawback of this approach is if you forget the API key, you must create a new hash and replace in since the hash is not reversible.

Setting up ProGet on IIS

All of the options that have been covered so far are free and do not have many moving parts once set up. While this is good for trying NuGet out, if you want to integrate with other tools or if you require vendor support for a system in the workplace, a better option may be ProGet.

Prerequisites

To set up ProGet, you’ll need some common prereqs you’re probably used to by now but with the additional of an optional SQL database.

Windows Server – Any currently supported version of Windows Server version will work, but all of the screenshots have been taken on Windows Server 2019 Standard

ProGet Installer – The version of ProGet I am using is 5.2.9.

SQL Instance – This is optional since ProGet has an option to install SQL Express from the installer, although this does require an internet connection from your server to do the initial download

Installing ProGet

From your web server run the ProGet installer. Since you’re setting up IIS, select the IIS web server option when installing ProGet. If you do not already have IIS installed, it will handle the installation during the install of ProGet.

The rest of the options you can leave as the default unless you want to host the ProGet database on a separate SQL server. In that case, you will need to specify the SQL instance to use.

If you leave the SQL Server option as Install Inedo instance it will install SQL Express server for you.

Installing ProGet

Once the installation finishes, launch the website when prompted and you should see a webpage come up that looks like the below screenshot.

ProGet Home

Configuring a PSRepository on ProGet

At this point, ProGet is installed. It’s pretty easy. Since we’re using PowerShell to work with NuGet packages, we’ll need to set up a PSRepository as we’ve previously done.

To set ProGet up for a PSRepository, navigate to the Feeds tab and create a new feed. You can name the feed anything you’d like. Then select Third-party package format and PowerShell as shown below.

Creating a ProGet PSRepository feed

Once you’ve created the feed, go back to the Feeds tab, select your new feed and it will show the URL used for publishing. This is what you would need to run in PowerShell on a device to publish to or download from this PSRepository.

Below is what was shown with the example from above:

Register-PSRepository -Name ProGet -SourceLocation http://<WebServer>:8624/nuget/PSRepository/ -PublishLocation http://<WebServer>:8624/nuget/PSRepository/ -InstallationPolicy Trusted

Adding an API Key

Like the other options, you need to generate an API key. To do this, click on the gear icon in the top right corner and then select API Keys from the left toolbar. Here you can see existing API keys and you can create new ones. You will immediately see a main difference between the open-source and enterprise ProGet. With ProGet, you can have many API keys.

ProGet API Keys

On the API Keys screen, click Create API Key. From here check the box for Feed API and click Save API Key.

Creating a ProGet API Key

Once the API key is created it will take you back to the API keys page. From here, you can use the API key that you see to publish packages to your feed.

Searching Packages with ProGet

ProGet also includes a web page that allows you to search all NuGet packages in the feed, see their download count, the name of the PowerShell modules, which feed a package was uploaded into and other similar package stats from the Packages page as shown below.

Viewing NuGet packages in ProGet

Alternatively, you can go to the Feeds page and select a feed to see only the packages for that feed. There you can drill down to individual packages to see the stats and other details about the packages as shown below.

Viewing individual ProGet packages

Updating ProGet

One of the nice parts about using a product that has positioned for an enterprise is that some of the more time-consuming administrative tasks are much faster. An example of this is updating ProGet.

To update ProGet to the newest version, simply open the Inedo Installer on your web server. This was installed when you first installed ProGet. Click on the Upgrade button and shown below and the installer will do the rest for you.

Updating ProGet

NuGet Tool Comparison

You’ve learned a lot about various NuGet tools in this article. If you’re still shopping around for which one to try out, in this section, you’ll get a glimpse into what makes each one different.

BaGet vs. LiGet

Since LiGet is a fork of BaGet, they share many similarities, including most of the setup process. In fact, you can follow the exact same setup procedure as BaGet.

Once installed, LiGet and BaGet do share some features but differ in other ways.

Feature BaGet LiGet Web Port 5000 9011 Source URL /v3/index.json /api/v3/index.json NuGet Search API v2 v3 API Key Plain Text SHA256 hash Web Interface Can see list of packages and commands to upload No web interface

While most of these differences do not affect use with PowerShell, the setup does change slightly due to using a hashed API key.

Both BaGet and LiGet are built on .NET Core which makes them cross-platform and usable on Linux operating systems. as well as Windows. Both also have Docker images available that, if you are already using a container service, can make the setup much faster and portable.

With the few differences between LiGet and BaGet, either one is a great option for an open-source, container-friendly, NuGet server. Both options allow for dipping your toe into a NuGet server on Windows while allowing yourself to move to Linux or a Docker image in the future without too much extra work.

BaGet vs ProGet

If you’d prefer not to roll your own to some degree and take the easy route, there’s always ProGet. There are downsides though. ProGet is not open source and not free by any means. But, it’s easier to set up and work with.

There are a few major differences between ProGet and BaGet.

Feature ProGet BaGet Cost ProGet Free: Free, ProGet Basic: $1995/yr, ProGet Enterprise: $9995+/year Free Platform Windows Windows, Linux, Docker Database SQL Internal Support ProGet Free: Email and Slack support, ProGet Basic and Enterprise: Defined SLAs with Email, Slack and Phone support Community based through GitHub issues

Inedo also has a breakdown all the feature differences between versions of ProGet.

Summary

In this article, you learned a ton about various NuGet tools and technologies. If you were on the fence about which NuGet server to use, you should now have a lot more knowledge to help you make that decision.

You learned about how to get each NuGet tool set up to work with Windows and we covered many of the features of each.

Further Reading