Is it possible to change the location of packages for NuGet?

Question

I have the following convention for most of my projects:

/src
    /Solution.sln
    /SolutionFolder
        /Project1
        /Project2
        /etc..
/lib
          


        

Answer 1

The solution proposed in release notes for 2.1 doesn't work out-of-the-box. They forgot to mention that there is code:

internal string ResolveInstallPath()
{
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.OutputDirectory))
    {
        return this.OutputDirectory;
    }
    ISettings settings = this._configSettings;

    ...
}

which prevents it from working. To fix this you need to modify your NuGet.targets file and remove 'OutputDirectory' parameter:

    $(NuGetCommand) install "$(PackagesConfig)" -source "$(PackageSources)"  $(RequireConsentSwitch)

So now, if you add 'repositoryPath' config somewhere in NuGet.config (see the release notes for a description of valid places to put the config files), it will restore all packages into single location, but... Your .csproj still contains hints to assemblies written as relative paths...

I still don't understand why they went hard way instead of changing PackageManager so it would add hint paths relative to PackagesDir. That's the way I do manually to have different package locations locally (on my desktop) and on build agent.

  True
  $(PackagesDir)\Autofac.2.6.3.862\lib\NET40\Autofac.Configuration.dll