tfsbuild - TFS2012 build server not restoring NuGet packages from in-house repository

Question

I've set up an in-house NuGet repository (a shared folder on one of our servers), and have added it to the "Available Sources" list in the Visual Studio NuGet settings on my PC. I'm able to successfully install a package into my solution from this repository.

However on the TFS server the build is failing because it can't restore this particular package (message: "Unable to find version 'xxx' of package 'xxx'"). The solution is configured for "enable NuGet package restore", which works fine for packages installed via nuget.org. It's just not restoring the package from our internal repository.

Permissions on the repository folder/share are fine. What am I missing?

I'm guessing I have to configure Visual Studio's "available sources" on the TFS server too, but presumably these settings are user-specific? The build service runs as NETWORK SERVICE, so how can I configure NuGet for this user?

Answer 1

You can add the source to a machine-wide config on the TFS build server and it will be included in the list of sources when doing package restores.

What I did was create a file %ProgramData%NuGetConfigsources.config that contained:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <packageSources>
    <add key="internal source" value="http://internal_server/nuget/" />
  </packageSources>
</configuration>

The name of the file doesn't matter, it's the location of the file. Nuget picks up any .config files under that folder.

http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/NuGet-Config-File#NuGet_config_extensibility_point

UPDATE 2016-11-18 According to http://blog.nuget.org/20161121/introducing-nuget4.0.html (under breaking changes), VS 2017+ and NuGet 4.0+ changes the location of the machine-wide config folder to %ProgramFiles(x86)%NuGetConfig.