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Creating legacy symbol packages (.symbols.nupkg)

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Important

The new recommended format for symbol packages is .snupkg. See Creating symbol packages (.snupkg).
.symbols.nupkg is still supported but only for compatibility reasons.

In addition to building packages for nuget.org or other sources, NuGet also supports creating associated symbol packages that can be published to symbol servers.

Creating a legacy symbol package

To create a legacy symbol package, follow these conventions:

  • Name the primary package (with your code) {identifier}.nupkg and include all your files except .pdb files.
  • Name the legacy symbol package {identifier}.symbols.nupkg and include your assembly DLL, .pdb files, XMLDOC files, source files (see the sections that follow).

You can create both packages with the -Symbols option, either from a .nuspec file or a project file:

nuget pack MyPackage.nuspec -Symbols

nuget pack MyProject.csproj -Symbols

Note that pack requires Mono 4.4.2 on Mac OS X and does not work on Linux systems. On a Mac, you must also convert Windows pathnames in the .nuspec file to Unix-style paths.

Legacy symbol package structure

A legacy symbol package can target multiple target frameworks in the same way that a library package does, so the structure of the lib folder should be exactly the same as the primary package, only including .pdb files alongside the DLL.

For example, a legacy symbol package that targets .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 would have this layout:

\lib
    \net40
        \MyAssembly.dll
        \MyAssembly.pdb
    \sl40
        \MyAssembly.dll
        \MyAssembly.pdb

Source files are then placed in a separate special folder named src, which must follow the relative structure of your source repository. This is because PDBs contain absolute paths to source files used to compile the matching DLL, and they need to be found during the publishing process. A base path (common path prefix) can be stripped out. For example, consider a library built from these files:

C:\Projects
    \MyProject
        \Common
            \MyClass.cs
        \Full
            \Properties
                \AssemblyInfo.cs
            \MyAssembly.csproj (producing \lib\net40\MyAssembly.dll)
        \Silverlight
            \Properties
                \AssemblyInfo.cs
            \MySilverlightExtensions.cs
            \MyAssembly.csproj (producing \lib\sl4\MyAssembly.dll)

Apart from the lib folder, a legacy symbol package would need to contain this layout:

\src
    \Common
        \MyClass.cs
    \Full
        \Properties
            \AssemblyInfo.cs
    \Silverlight
        \Properties
            \AssemblyInfo.cs
        \MySilverlightExtensions.cs

Referring to files in the nuspec

A legacy symbol package can be built by conventions, from a folder structure as described in the previous section, or by specifying its contents in the files section of the manifest. For example, to build the package shown in the previous section, use the following in the .nuspec file:

<files>
    <file src="Full\bin\Debug\*.dll" target="lib\net40" />
    <file src="Full\bin\Debug\*.pdb" target="lib\net40" />
    <file src="Silverlight\bin\Debug\*.dll" target="lib\sl40" />
    <file src="Silverlight\bin\Debug\*.pdb" target="lib\sl40" />
    <file src="**\*.cs" target="src" />
</files>

See also