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Automated Dependency Updates for NuGet

Categories: dotnet

Renovate supports updating NuGet dependencies.

File Matching

By default, Renovate will check any files matching any of the following regular expressions:

/\.(?:cs|fs|vb)proj$/
/\.(?:props|targets)$/
/(^|/)dotnet-tools\.json$/
/(^|/)global\.json$/

For details on how to extend a manager's managerFilePatterns value, please follow this link.

Supported datasources

This manager supports extracting the following datasources: docker, dotnet-version, nuget.

Default config

{
  "managerFilePatterns": [
    "/\\.(?:cs|fs|vb)proj$/",
    "/\\.(?:props|targets)$/",
    "/(^|/)dotnet-tools\\.json$/",
    "/(^|/)global\\.json$/"
  ]
}

Additional Information

Use packageRules to control the behavior of the NuGet package manager.

The NuGet package manager supports these SDK-style files and formats:

  • .csproj
  • .fsproj
  • .vbproj
  • .props
  • .targets
  • global.json
  • dotnet-tools.json

.NET Core projects are supported by default.

For Renovate to work with .NET Framework projects, you need to update these files so they match the new SDK-style format:

  • .csproj
  • .fsproj
  • .vbproj
  • .props
  • .targets

Disabling updates for pinned versions

In NuGet, when you use versions like Version="1.2.3" then it means "1.2.3 or greater, up to v2" When you use versions like Version="[1.2.3]" then it means "exactly 1.2.3".

If you would like Renovate to disable updating of exact versions (warning: you might end up years out of date and not realize it) then here is an example configuration to achieve that:

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "description": "Skip pinned versions",
      "matchManagers": ["nuget"],
      "matchCurrentValue": "/^\\[[^,]+\\]$/",
      "enabled": false
    }
  ]
}

Workload restore

Sometimes you need to run dotnet workload restore to ensure that all required workloads are installed before restoring the project. You can enable this behavior by adding dotnetWorkloadRestore to the postUpdateOptions in your Renovate configuration.

{
  "postUpdateOptions": ["dotnetWorkloadRestore"]
}