Installing Packages through Nuget - "Central Directory corrupt"

Question

I'm trying to add a package to my project using NuGet (in VS2015). When I click the "Install" button I see

Downloading missing packages...

at the top of the screen with a progress bar.

After a moment the message is replaced with -

An error occurred while trying to restore packages: Central Directory corrupt.

with a "Restore" button at the end which does the same process.

Anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Answer 1

Edit 07/2017

A far easier method of solving this issue is be to just get Visual Studio to re-download the package -

1. In Visual Studio open Tools -> Options.
2. Select NuGet Package Manager.
3. Ensure both Allow NuGet to download missing packages and Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio are both ticked.
4. Click OK.
5. In a file explorer window navigate into the projects' "packages" folder.
6. Three options -
   • Figure out which package is at fault as described in the original answer and delete it's folder.
   • Move all the packages to a temporary location if you're unsure whether they're all still available in NuGet (you'll need to copy the missing ones back afterwards)
   • Delete all the package folders if you are sure all your packages are still available in NuGet.
7. Back in Visual Studio build your solution.
8. Visual Studio should download all your packages.

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Original Answer

Ok, the problem here was that the .nupkg file for one package (found in project root/packges/package folder) had been corrupted at some point and had a size of zero.

I figured out which package was corrupt after attempting to manually install a random package using the package manager console -

Install-Package *package name*

which told me that there was a problem with a currently installed package -

Install-Package : An error occurred while retrieving package metadata for 'package name'....

From there I was able to fix it by doing the following -

1. Navigate to the to the NuGet site
2. Search for the project using the search facility at the top of the page
3. Download the .nupkg file using the "Download" link on the left hand side (checking the version number).
4. Copy the downloaded file over the old one in the "packages" folder.

Answer 2

Remove all nuget packages under \packages\ ( i had multiple corrupted packages)

Go to your solution in Visual Studio and press "Restore Nuget Packages"

Rebuild your solution

Should be fixed :)