Additional caches

Paket works well with central repositories like nuget.org or myget.org. Under normal circumstances these repositories are always available and allow you to retrieve all packages for the rest of all time. Unfortunately there are times when the central repository is not reachable or even worse: packages may be removed permanently from the feed.

This happened in other ecosystems, but also on nuget.org and can lead to breaking builds and a lot of trouble for the users.

There are different solutions to this problem and one is using "additional caches" with Paket.

Caching on a network share

By using a network share as an additional package cache Paket will store all used packages automatically on that network share. Every restore process will try to retrieve the package from the cache before hitting the central repository. As long as nobody deletes packages from the network share, package restore will continue to work.

Configuration of additional network share as caches can be done in the paket.dependencies file:

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source https://nuget.org/api/v2
cache //hive/dependencies

nuget Newtonsoft.Json
nuget UnionArgParser
nuget FSharp.Core

Caching locally inside the repository

Many projects decide to commit all dependencies into the version control system. Some people argue that this bloats the version control system, but it also ensures that dependencies are always available after checkout.

With a local dependency cache you can instruct Paket to copy dependencies to a local directory. This directory will then contain the *.nupkg files of all dependencies and may be committed to source control.

Note: In contrast to the default packages directory this new directory will only contain the zipped dependencies. This way the packages directory which also contains the unzipped versions can still be excluded from version control.

The configuration can be done in the paket.dependencies file:

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source https://nuget.org/api/v2
cache ./nupkgs versions: current

nuget Newtonsoft.Json
nuget UnionArgParser
nuget FSharp.Core

Caching options

Paket allows you to set two caching options:

versions:all: Store all versions of the dependencies ever used.
versions:current: Store only currently used version of the dependencies and delete all other version. This option should not be used with network shares since it might affect other projects.

Caches as package feeds

All configured caches are automatically used as additional source feeds. Even if a package gets removed from the central repository paket update will work. The fact that it's now only found in the cache will be written to the paket.lock file.

All packages in the cache are treated as "unlisted". This means Paket's resolver will only use these packages in a new resolution if the central feed has no unlisted packages.

NuGet machine cache

In addition to the above, Paket will also cache packages to a local machine cache, which defaults to %LocalAppData%\NuGet\Cache.

This location can be overridden to support cases where parallelized installs (or updates) are prone to file locks, such as when running multiple build agent processes on a single server.

To override at the process level, define a process environment variable called NuGetCachePath with the custom location, such as

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$ $env:NuGetCachePath = "C:\NuGetCaches\BuildAgentName"
$ paket install

1:	`$ NuGetCachePath=/tmp paket install`