How am I supposed to perform nuget restore with MSBuild

Question

I am migrating an MSBuild 15 project to MSBuild 17. I used to call nuget restore directly. Now "maybe?" I am supposed to MSBuild.exe /restore ( or is it -t:restore ?) with restore arg? This doesn't seem to work however and leaves many nuget assemblies out. It all works fine from Visual Studio Solution and IDE, but fresh checkout never does proper restore using MSBuild. Can someone tell me how to get MSBuild to work like Visual Studio 2022?

I am calling C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe

File Version 17.6.3.22601.

It always leaves out DocumentFormat.OpenXml.dll.

The cproj files have the following

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="DocumentFormat.OpenXml">
      <Version>2.11.0</Version>
    </PackageReference>
  </ItemGroup>

Answer 1

I see this in log file where I rely on MSBuild restore arg to do something. Instead it does nothing.

Target "ResolveNuGetPackageAssets" skipped, due to false condition; ('$(ResolveNuGetPackages)' == 'true' and exists('$(ProjectLockFile)')) was evaluated as ('true' == 'true' and exists('obj\project.assets.json')).

There are NO obj\project.assets.json files anywhere so I guess it expects some project lock file?

I can only get obj\project.assets.json files if I call NUGET.exe directly with restore. So I guess do NOT us msbuild with restore command or use both . Who knows.....

Answer 2

Hi @flagrant99, 

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A! 

You can use msbuild -t:restore to restore packages.

For more details, you can refer to: Restore by using MSBuild. 

Sincerely,

Anna

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Answer 3

As far as I know there are three ways to perform NUGET restore. It used to be I just called NUGET.exe restore and all was good. For some reason this stopped working completely in MSBUILD17. There MSBuild has two new forms of restore. msbuild -t:restore and msbuild /restore. They are not the same.

https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/issues/3000#issuecomment-417675215

I finally got my stuff working by calling NUGET.exe restore first to create project.assets.json

Then msbuild /restore to restore the dlls.

I am not messing around with the different? -t:restore.