Powershell NuGet Metadata Cmdlet

Ever wanted to get metadata from your NuGet packages, such as author or license information? Ever wanted to get metadata from your NuGet packages, such as author or license information? Got lost looking for it in Visual Studio? Are you looking for a simple script that is able to output all metadata information from a single command? Look no further!

Table of contents

1. Installation
2. Examples

• Simple usage
• Exporting output
• Excluding packages
• Downloading license information

3. Release History
4. License

This cmdlet is easy to use and simple to integrate with your build / continuous integration process. If you don't have any previous experience with scripting or PowerShell, follow the examples below.

Installation

Open powershell and run

$ Install-Module NuGetMetadata

This cmdlet is publicly distributed through PowerShell gallery. To install, simply open a powershell window (run as administrator) and run the following:

PS> Install-Module NuGetMetadata

Examples

Simple usage

Open a PowerShell prompt in your project directory and run:

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata

It will output the metadata contents of every NuGet package within the project. It does this by searching for .nupkg files in the folder you're in, open them, and output the contents of the .nuspec files it finds.

You can provide both folders and files:

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata C:\Project\

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata .\example.nupkg

Or a combination of both:

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata .\example.nupkg, C:\Project\

Exporting output

With powershell it's easy to save the data to file.

To CSV

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation ./my-metadata-file.csv

This produces a file named my-metadata-file.csv in the directory you are in.

To JSON

Since the Get-NugetMetadata cmdlet produces xml objects, it can't be easily converted to Json using ConvertTo-Json. One workaround is to pipe via select, which then creates a PSObject that can be converted:

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata | Select-Object id, version, licenseUrl | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File ./my-metadata-file.csv

Excluding packages

To exclude, for example, Microsoft packages:

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata | ? { $_.id -notlike 'Microsoft*' }

Downloading license information

This is just a simple example. One caveat is that it doesn't clean the output folder on each invocation.

In your project directory, create a folder called "Licenses".

PS> mkdir Licenses

The line below downloads the license url contents, and saves them as separate html files (named after the identifier).

PS> Get-NuGetMetadata | select id, licenseUrl | % { (Invoke-WebRequest $_.licenseUrl).Content |
Out-File -FilePath "./Licenses/$($_.id).html" }

Release History

• 1.0.0
  • Released and published on PowerShell Gallery

License

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.