How to download a nupkg package from nuget programmatically in .NET Core?

Question

In past with .NET Framework I used this example for working with nuget programmatically

Play with Packages, programmatically!

Is there any equivalent source for

Answer 1

Best way to achieve it is by referring NugetDownloader Nuget package in your Project and use it to download any other package programmatically

Install-Package NugetDownloader

Source code and help guide on the same is available at : https://github.com/paraspatidar/NugetDownloader

Here is a quick sample on how to achieve it :

string packageName="Newtonsoft.json";
string version="10.2.1.0"; \\optional

\\initilize NugetEngine from NugetDownloader namespaces

NugetEngine nugetEngine = new NugetEngine();
nugetEngine.GetPackage(packageName, version).Wait();

sample client is also available at https://github.com/paraspatidar/NugetDownloader/tree/master/NugetDownloaderTestConsole

Alternately In case if you want to build your Nugetdownloader engine from scratch , then you might also refer https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host/blob/dev/src/WebJobs.Script/Description/DotNet/PackageManager.cs as it has something similar implementation , but that too much of code understanding and extraction.

Answer 2

The code sample you have shown uses NuGet 2 which is not supported on .NET Core. You'll need to use NuGet 3 or the (soon to be released) NuGet 4. These APIs are a huge break from NuGet 2. One of these breaking changes is that NuGet.Core is obsolete on won't be ported to .NET Core.

Checkout NuGet API v3 on docs.microsoft.com for info on NuGet 3. At the time of writing, this doc is basically a big TODO and doesn't have much info.

Here are some blog posts that are more useful.

Exploring the NuGet v3 Libraries, Part 1 Introduction and concepts

Exploring the NuGet v3 Libraries, Part 2

Exploring the NuGet v3 Libraries, Part 3

And of course, you can always go spelunking through NuGet's source code to find more examples. Most of the core logic lives in https://github.com/nuget/nuget.client.