Easy package updates with NuKeeper update

10 Jan 2019

Ever get tired of updating nuget packages all over the place? I know i was. For a project that i’m currently working on we have a microservices architecture with about four domains. We have our own packages distributed by Azure DevOps that are used in all of these domains. The packages are EventSourcing.Shared, EventSourcing.Store, EventSourcing.PubSub and a few more.

Now every time we update the sourcecode of EventSourcing. We are required to open all different solutions and update all the packages to the latest version. This is a very tedious and boring task. Fortunately there is a tool out there that can help us do this, hello NuKeeper!

NuKeeper

NuKeeper is a dotnet tool that automagically update NuGet packages in all your .NET projects. It is not tied to a specific solution or project file, you can target you current directory and it will work for all your csproj files or even your Directory.Build.props.

It has some very powerful commands that you can check out on the website. I might blog about them later on but for now let’s focus on our problem!

Installing it is a simple as dotnet tool install nukeeper --global

Solution

As you can see on the NuKeeper website there is a command called update. It will update all your Nuget Packages that you target on your local file system. It also has a really nice feature in which you can provide a regex pattern so that we can specify only the packages that we want updated! To update our local packages the only thing we have to do run this command in the root of our repository:

nukeeper update --include ^EventSourcing. --age 0 --maxupdate 50

• --include takes a regex on which packages we want to update
• --age allows you to specify the age of your packages, for our use case we just updated the eventsourcing source so we want the latest and greatest bits. Default is 7 days.
• --maxupdate the name already says it, how many update do you want to do at max?

That’s it! No more opening .sln everywhere and opening your package manager screen to update it all. Just run the command and you are done!

Want to automatically update and create a PR? Have a look at the repo command. This will create PR’s on your repo!