Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Introducing the NuGet gallery

Back in December, I blogged about how poor the NuGet package submission process was. You had to clone a HUGE repository that had all the other packages, add your package files to it, and submit a pull request. It was something that we had meant to last a couple weeks, and it lasted a few months, way overstaying its welcome.

The good news is that that process is now obsolete! Instead of have a brand new gallery site that lets authors publish packages very easily.

And the site it.. drums… http://nuget.org!

Who is this site for?

To set expectations, please note that this site is not feature complete yet, and is still rough in many ways. Eventually, it will be a place for both package authors and consumers, but in the short term, it’s primarily useful to package authors.

So basically, this site provides a complete (and much better) replacement for the old package submission process, and at this point that is its main focus.

So if you are using NuGet from Visual Studio to install packages, you can probably ignore this site for now. It will be come interesting later, but it isn’t now. You’re certainly welcome to browse around it, but there is no point in creating an account now unless you have packages to submit.

Getting started with the site

Here is what you need to do if you’re a package author wanting the submit a package.

  • Go to http://nuget.org, click Sign In, and Register Now
  • After registering, you’ll get an email with a link you need to click (check your junk mail, it’s probably there!).
  • An admin then needs to approve your account (see below for the reason behind that)
  • Once you’re approved, you can just go to the Contribute tab and click Add New Package to upload your .nupkg files. They will be live on the feed instantly, though it may take a couple minutes for it to show up on the site itself.

If you submitted packages with the old process

If you previously submitted packages using the old process, you will need to be given ownership of those packages in the new gallery before you can upload new versions.

Just ping @davidebbo on twitter and I can take care of that.

Why the approval process?

Eventually, there won’t be any approval process. The reason we chose to have one initially is that the site is still very young and we want to take it step by step. We will generally approve anyone that wants to get packages up there.

If you registered and don’t see your account getting approved, please just ping me or Phil Haack on twitter (@davidebbo, @haacked).

What, no Live ID or OpenID?

I know, this is really something we should be supporting, and we will later.  We had to make that cut in order to get the gallery out sooner, as the current situation with package submission was simply not sustainable.

Built on Orchard

The NuGet gallery was built using Orchard, which itself is still very young (1.0 release is around the corner). This could be one of the first real sites built using it, so it is both a great learning experience for the Orchard team, and a good showcase of the technology.

There were certainly a number of Orchard issues during development, but since the team is just down the hall from us, they took good care of things!

Open Source

Just like NuGet itself, the gallery site was built as open source. Most of the development was done by NimblePros.

If you want to look through the sources, there are two CodePlex projects, one for the Orchard gallery site and one for the backend.

The gallery is at http://orchardgallery.codeplex.com, and the backend is at http://galleryserver.codeplex.com/.

How to report issues and give feedback

If you run into issues or want to give feedback about the site, feel free to start a discussion or file a bug on http://orchardgallery.codeplex.com.

35 comments:

  1. See this page, it returns a server error:
    http://nuget.org/Packages/ByAuthor/Google,%20%20Inc.

    (Its the link for the author of all Google Nuget packages)

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  2. I sign today but don't get a confirmation email (spam checked). Now can't Sign In, but Restore Password worked (get email and change a password).

    Please help :)

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  3. @andexx: I resent your confirmation email.

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  4. I thought "I resent your confirmation email." was weird, until I realized it meant "sent again" :-)

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  5. Registered and confirmed my email successfully, but can't login, even after changing my password. Is there anything broken with login at the moment?

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  6. David, it is really difficult to navigate in packages on nuget.org! Some categorization, sorting, filtering etc will be very helpful! Rating will be fine too!

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  7. @Mark: is it working now? If not, what's your username?

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  8. @Socrates: yes, the site is still rough. See my post above for details. At this point, it is mostly for package authors, not for discovering packages.

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  9. @David, yes letting me in now, thanks

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  10. I finally got in but I have one minor issue with the process listed above. I don't use twitter and I would like my account associated with a package (account is JaCraig and the package is Craig's Utility Library).

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  11. I can't login too... My username is DouglasAguiar.

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  12. @douglas: please see instructions in the confirmation email you received.

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  13. Hi David,

    I signed up last Thursday and I still can't login... Could you please have a look ? My username is tom103

    Thanks !

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  14. @Thomas, your account should be good to go now

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  15. @David, thanks, it works now !

    Is there a way to take ownership of a package I contributed before the gallery was online ? The package id is dvp-net

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  16. @David could you confirm my account? My username is Gidon. I would like to add my RateIt jquery plugin (http://rateit.codeplex.com/) to the gallery.

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  17. @Gidon: your account is now active

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  18. Is Nuget open for non open source software assuming that software is free or some similar license?

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  19. Hi David,

    First off, congreatulations for having it up and running. I was (badly) waiting for it.

    I registered three days ago (pretty excitingly) and I got the confirmation email. I have been trying to log in since then without luck.
    User name: dgon

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  20. @Daniel: your account is now approved

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  21. Is there an RSS feed for the packages on nuget.org? I want to use it for the main feed.

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  22. @Jason: yes, the feed is http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669, and should be the default when you install NuGet in VS. Note that it's an OData Atom feed, not RSS.

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  23. @David:
    Thanks a bunch David, keep up the great work.

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  24. can't login either after several password resets

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  25. @Morgan: please make sure you follow all the instructions in the email sent by the gallery to get your account enabled.

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  26. yes, make sure you check your junk mail... :)

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  27. Help...I must not have had enough coffee. Got signed up, confirmation email worked great. However, when I find a package I want (MVC3dataannotaionsextensions) I can't figure out how to download the package. If I click version history there is a hyperlink for the previous version but the current version shows but no link. If it's supposed to be the big black bar that's on the page it's not clickable. Sorry if its obvious...and I'm not even a newbie :-)

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  28. @Paul: you need to install the NuGet VS extension to download packages. Click the blue button on http://nuget.org/ to get started.

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  29. Hi,
    I'm working on the DotSpatial project (dotspatial.codeplex.com). I tried to upload the DotSpatial.nupgk package (44 MB) to the nuget.org site, but it fails with '404' server error.

    Is there any limitation on the .nupgk file size?

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  30. @Jiri: not sure, I thought we didn't have size restrictions, but didn't test anything this large. The largest current package in 22MB. You may want to file a bug for investigation.

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  31. Hi,
    Just try to push me package to official feed and got "The Package could not be uploaded: There is not enough space on the disk.\u000d\u000a". However it's only 23Kb in size.
    Don't know what to do.

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  32. The disk was in fact full! :( There should be plenty of space now. @Jiri, maybe that was the issue for you as well.

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  33. Hi,

    I'm trying to use fluentcassandra. Is there any documentation, examples and FAQ.

    Thanks,

    Fábio Câncio

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  34. Hi,
    I have written a blog post on how to easily set up the Orchard Gallery with the NuGet template with the included PowerShell script (http://espenao.posterous.com/create-nuget-gallery-with-orchard-using-the-i)

    ReplyDelete