Throughout this book, you’ve seen the NuGet Package Manager Console making use of PowerShell. Although those chapters already covered the most important NuGet commands, this appendix lists all available NuGet commands exposed in the NuGet Package Manager Console.

This appendix builds on top of the contents of this book and will provide references to other parts of this book as well. However, this appendix is not meant to be a full PowerShell reference; there are plenty of good books on that topic.

Parts of this appendix are based on the information available on the official NuGet web site at http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/package-manager-console-powershell-reference. The NuGet documentation (from the Outercurve Foundation) is licensed under Creative Commons license BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Support for Common Parameters

Note that the PowerShell commands listed in this appendix all support the following set of common PowerShell cmdlet parameters, indicated by the [<CommonParameters>] option:

• Verbose
• Debug
• ErrorAction
• ErrorVariable
• WarningAction
• WarningVariable
• OutBuffer
• OutVariable

For more-detailed information, you can simply type Get-Help About_CommonParameters in the NuGet Package Manager Console if the PowerShell help documents are installed on your system.

Adding Binding Redirects

This command adds binding redirects to the app.config or web.config file:

Add-BindingRedirect [-ProjectName] <string>

It has not been explicitly mentioned earlier in this book because, as of NuGet v1.2, this command is run automatically when needed during package installation. The available parameter for this command is shown in Table C-1.

Getting a Package or a Set of Packages

This command gets a package or a set of packages available from the package source:

Get-Package -Source <string> [-ListAvailable] [-Updates] [-ProjectName] [-Filter•
 <string>] [-First <int>] [-Skip <int>] [-IncludePrerelease] [-AllVersions]

This command defaults to showing only the list of installed packages. Use the -ListAvailable flag to list packages available from the package source. Available options for this command are shown in Table C-2.

Using this command, you can easily loop through all installed packages on the MyProject project. The following command prints all installed package IDs for the current project into the Package Manager Console window:

Get-Package -ProjectName MyProject | % { Write-Host "$_.Id is installed" }

It can also be used to search for packages. The following example searches for the jQuery package from all configured package sources:

Get-Package -ListAvailable -Filter jQuery

The package source that should be queried can be specified explicitly. The following example searches for the jQuery package from the www.myget.org/F/pronuget feed:

Get-Package -ListAvailable -Filter jQuery -Source https://www.myget.org/F/pronuget

Getting Project Information

This command gets the specified project. If none is specified, it returns the default project (which is selected from the drop-down in the Package Manager Console toolbar). The project is returned as an EnvDTE.Project instance.

Get-Project [[-Name] <string>] [-All] [<CommonParameters>]

Available parameters for this command are shown in Table C-3.

An example of calling Get-Project is shown in Figure C-1; it illustrates the output including the ProjectName, Type, and FullName properties of the object.

This command opens up quite a few interesting opportunities to further automate the way we work with NuGet, and by extension, Visual Studio.

An example use case could be to install a package in multiple target projects at once, based on some selection criteria. For instance, let’s say we want to install the NUnit package into all of our testing projects, which are named using the convention *Tests. This is not something you can easily achieve by using the user interface dialog boxes of the NuGet Visual Studio extension. Smart usage of the Get-Project command, however, allows you to achieve this very easily, as shown in Listing C-1.

Listing C-1.  Installing a Package in Selected Target Projects by Using the Get-Project Cmdlet

Get-Project -All | Where { $_.Name.EndsWith("Tests ") } | Install-Package NUnit

When combining the Get-Project command with the Get-Package command, you could also list all installed packages for each project. Listing C-2 shows you how you can do this by using a single line in PowerShell.

Listing C-2.  Listing All Installed Packages for All Projects in the Current Visual Studio Solution

Get-Project -All | % { Write-Host $_.ProjectName; Get-Package -ProjectName •
$_.ProjectName | % { Write-Host "  $_.Id is installed" } }

Installing Packages

This command installs a NuGet package and, by default, its dependencies into the target project:

Install-Package [-Id] <string> [-IgnoreDependencies] [-ProjectName <string>] [[-Version]
 <string>] [[-Source] <string>] [-IncludePrerelease] [-FileConflictAction] [<CommonParameters>]

Available parameters for this command are shown in Table C-4.

Opening Package Pages

This command will open the browser pointing to ProjectUrl, LicenseUrl, or ReportAbuseUrl of the specified package.

Open-PackagePage -Id <string> [-Version] [-Source] [-License] [-ReportAbuse] [-PassThru]•
 [<CommonParameters>]

Available parameters for this command are shown in Table C-6.

Uninstalling Packages

This command uninstalls a NuGet package. If other packages depend on this package, the command will fail unless the –Force option is specified.

Uninstall-Package [-Id] <string> [-RemoveDependencies] [-Force] [-Version <string>]•
 [-ProjectName <string>] [<CommonParameters>]

Available parameters for this command are shown in Table C-7.

Updating Packages

This command updates a package and its dependencies to a newer version:

Update-Package [-Id] <string> [-IgnoreDependencies] [-ProjectName <string>] [-Version•
 <string>] [-Safe] [-Source <string>] [-IncludePrerelease] [-FileConflictAction] • [-Reinstall] [<CommonParameters>]

Available parameters for this command are shown in Table C-8.

Chaining PowerShell Cmdlets

By chaining cmdlets, we can perform some very nice operations in our projects. How about retrieving all distinct license URLs for all packages that have been installed in a solution?

Get-Package | Open-PackagePage -License -WhatIf -PassThru | %{ $_.OriginalString }

Or maybe we want to create a list of all packages installed in our solution?

Get-Package | %{ $_.Id + " " + $_.Version } | Select-Object -unique