I am creating a nuget package from some code, but also need to deploy some tools with the package.
In a .nuspec file, I can do this with the <files> element, and this all works well.
However when using a .nuspec file, the packageReferences from the csproj file aren't included, and I am seeing some problems when including them manually (with the <dependencies> element).
The package created also always seems to restore as a .net framework package, even though it is targetting .net, as in this question.
I am hoping that all these problems would go away if I moved to using the .csproj format for specifying the nuget package details, but having read the docs I can't find out how to do it.
Does anyone know how it is done?
If not, can anyone shed any light on created a .net framework / .net core nuget package from a .nuspec file, that restores to the correct target version and respects package dependencies?
It's not easy to find/discover, but NuGet's MSBuild tasks docs page has a section called "including content in a package", which tells you about the PackagePath metadata on MSBuild items, that NuGet uses to copy files into the package.
So, in your csproj, you could have something like this:
<ItemGroup>
<None Include="..\MyTool\Tool.exe" PackagePath="tools" Pack="true" />
</ItemGroup>
and then your package will contain tools\Tool.exe. The Pack="true" attribute is required for None elements.
You can use MSBuild's globbing to copy entire directories, if that's easier. Include="..\MyTool\*". My MSBuild skills are not so advanced, so I don't know how to glob ..\MyTool\**\*, which means all files in all subdirectories, while maintaining the correct directory layout in the PackagePath="???" metadata. So the best I can suggest is one glob per directory.