29 May 2020

What is nuget restore doing?

Ever wonder what nuget or dotnet restore is doing? What feeds it using? Or what nuget.config it is using to find feeds?

Turns out you can find out what nuget-related information dotnet restore by looking at the logs.

Generally, dotnet restore is succinct. Restoring a HelloWorld project gives us little information about what’s going on:

$ dotnet new console --no-restore
The template "Console Application" was created successfully.
$ dotnet restore
  Restore completed in 72.1 ms for /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj.

If we add a nuget.config file, we still see little information. Not even enough to know if it’s even being used:

$ rm -rf *
$ dotnet new console --no-restore
The template "Console Application" was created successfully.
$ dotnet new nugetconfig
The template "NuGet Config" was created successfully.
$ ls
HelloWorld.csproj  nuget.config  Program.cs
$ dotnet restore
  Restore completed in 52.87 ms for /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj.

And it certainly doesn’t give us a hint about any other nuget.config files are being used.

But we can find out more from dotnet restore by increasing the verbosity to normal:

$ rm -rf *
$ dotnet new console --no-restore
The template "Console Application" was created successfully.
$ dotnet new nugetconfig
The template "NuGet Config" was created successfully.
$ dotnet restore --verbosity:normal
Build started 5/29/2020 11:14:01 PM.
     1>Project "/home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj" on node 1 (Restore target(s)).
     1>Restore:
         Restoring packages for /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj...
         Committing restore...
         Generating MSBuild file /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/obj/HelloWorld.csproj.nuget.g.props.
         Generating MSBuild file /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/obj/HelloWorld.csproj.nuget.g.targets.
         Writing assets file to disk. Path: /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/obj/project.assets.json
         Restore completed in 54.6 ms for /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj.

         NuGet Config files used:
             /home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/nuget.config
             /home/omajid/.nuget/NuGet/NuGet.Config

         Feeds used:
             https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json
     1>Done Building Project "/home/omajid/cliche/dotnet/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.csproj" (Restore target(s)).

Build succeeded.
    0 Warning(s)
    0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:00.43

Now we can see a list of all the nuget.config files being used. Turns out there is one in my home directory at ~/.nuget/NuGet/NuGet.config that I probably would have missed even if I had dug around in the project directory.

If you are wondering about the particular output format, this is just the normal log output from msbuild. That’s why we see a Task called Restore running.

There are a couple of possible configurations for verbosity. q (or quiet) is the default. n (or normal) can be handy. diagnostic or detailed can show a lot of information that can be a bit hard to parse by hand.

You can even make the invocation smaller: dotnet restore -v:n sets verbosity (via -v) to normal (via n).

Hopefully, you now have a new tool to debug/traces any issues you might be hitting during dotnet restore!