Restoring Nuget References?

Question

Try re-installing the packages.

In the NuGet Package Manager Console enter the following command:

Update-Package -Reinstall -ProjectName Your.Project.Name

If you want to re-install packages and restore references for the whole solution omit the -ProjectName parameter.

You need to Enable NuGet package restore at the VS solution level for the restore missing package to work.

In case this helps someone, for me, none of the above was sufficient. I still couldn't build, VS still couldn't find the references. The key was simply to close and reopen the solution after restoring the packages.

Here's the scenario (using Visual Studio 2012):

You open a Solution that has missing packages. The references show that VS can't find them. There are many ways to restore the missing packages, including

• building a solution that is set to auto-restore
• opening the Package Manager Console and clicking the nice "Restore" button
• doing nuget restore if you have the command line nuget installed

But no matter what the approach, those references will still be shown as missing. And when you build it will fail. Sigh. However if you close the solution and re-open it, now VS checks those nice <HintPath>s again, finds that the packages are back where they belong, and all is well with the world.

Update

Is Visual Studio still not seeing that you have the package? Still showing a reference that it can't resolve? Make sure that the version of package you restored is exactly the same as the <HintPath> in your .csproj file. Even a minor bug fix number (e.g. 1.10.1 to 1.10.2) will cause the reference to fail. You can fix this either by directly editing your csproj xml, or else by removing the reference and making a new one pointing at the newly-restored version in the packages directory.

While the solution provided by @jmfenoll works, it updates to the latest packages. In my case, having installed beta2 (prerelease) it updated all of the libs to RC1 (which had a bug). Thus the above solution does only half of the job.

If you are in the same situation as I am and you would like to synchronize your project with the exact version of the NuGet packages you have/or specified in your packages.config, then, then this script might help you. Simply copy&paste it into your Package Manager Console

function Sync-References([string]$PackageId) {
  get-project -all | %{
    $proj = $_ ;
    Write-Host $proj.name; 
    get-package -project $proj.name | ? { $_.id -match $PackageId } | % { 
      Write-Host $_.id; 
      uninstall-package -projectname $proj.name -id $_.id -version $_.version -RemoveDependencies -force ;
      install-package -projectname $proj.name -id $_.id -version $_.version
    }
  }
}

And then execute it either with a sepific package name like

Sync-References AutoMapper

or for all packages like

Sync-References

Credits go to Dan Haywood and his blog post.

The following script can be run in the Package Manger Console window, and will remove all packages from each project in your solution before reinstalling them.

foreach ($project in Get-Project -All) { 
    $packages = Get-Package -ProjectName $project.ProjectName
    foreach ($package in $packages) {
        Uninstall-Package $package.Id -Force -ProjectName $project.ProjectName
    }
    foreach ($package in $packages) {
        Install-Package $package.Id -ProjectName $project.ProjectName -Version $package.Version
    }
}

This will run every package's install script again, which should restore the missing assembly references. Unfortunately, all the other stuff that install scripts can do -- like creating files and modifying configs -- will also happen again. You'll probably want to start with a clean working copy, and use your SCM tool to pick and choose what changes in your project to keep and which to ignore.

This script will reinstall all packages of a project without messing up dependencies or installing dependencies that may have been intentianlyz removed. (More for their part package developers.)

Update-Package -Reinstall -ProjectName Proteus.Package.LinkedContent -IgnoreDependencies

I added the DLLs manually. Right clicked on References in the project, select Add Reference and then in the dialog pressed the Browse button. The NuGet DLLs where in the packages directory of the solution. To get the names of them you can right click on references in another project that's working properly and select properties and look in the path property.