Publishing executables and websites with NuGet

Question

I'm looking to standardize our publishing mechanism for libraries, executables and websites.

All the documentation on the NuGet website talks about publishing libraries, tools and source files but there does not seem to be any guidance on the directory structure when publishing fully packaged executables and websites.

Is there any guidance or existing convention on this?

If I were to make something up it would look like:

exe/net40/*.*
website/net40/**/*.*

Answer 1

We are using Octopus Deploy by Paul Stovell, an automated deployment tool which pulls from a Nuget feed and distributes your application using a central dashboard.

We also have some msbuild scripts following the conventions on his site which tell you how to build the nuget files.

Apparently, the latest version of Teamcity (EAP) can automatically package your artifacts to nuget packages and act as a NuGet server.

We have had much success using both TC and Octopus Deploy for automated build and deployment.

Answer 2

NuGet was not meant for tools/applications/executables. It is meant for things that go into the source and working with the source. Where NuGet stops, Chocolatey comes in. You can also use Octopus for conventional deployment, see the answer in this question with Octopus Deploy. You can also integrate Chocolatey with Octopus.

Chocolatey will have better support for packaging up websites and getting them installed as websites in the future. At the time of this answer it doesn't yet have a built in function for installing a web application.