How to specify which version of nuget.exe to use with self-hosted agent in Azure DevOps?

Question

I'm running self-hosted agent and NuGetToolInstaller was always throwing an error ERR:unable to get local issuer certificate.

I found a fix-hack here. Just to download needed nuget.exe version to the machine, add it to Environment Variables and remove NuGetToolInstaller at all. It fixed the issue, but today I understood that it's not really so.

Currently, I have nuget.exe version 5.6.0 so I thought self-hosted agent uses it but...

While running Initialize Job Azure downloads NuGetCommand

I found the location and can see that it downloads three different versions of nuget.exe

And it always uses 4.1.0 for any NuGetCommand.

How can I specify which version of NuGet to use without NuGetToolInstaller?

Or how to make Initialize Job not downloading any nuget.exe and just use that one available in the system?

For testing I deleted everything from the yaml and it looks like this:

trigger:
- master
pool:
  name: somePool    
jobs:
- job: someJob  
  variables:
      solution: '**/*.sln'
      buildPlatform: 'Any CPU'
      buildConfiguration: 'Release'  
  steps:
    - task: NuGetCommand@2
      inputs:
        restoreSolution: '$(solution)'

Answer 1

From the pipeline log, it seems nuget task use v4.1 by default:

If you don't want to use NuGetToolInstaller task, one workaround is replacing the nuget.exe with the version you want to use in the {agent work folder}\_tool\NuGet\4.1.0\x64 folder.