C H A P T E R  7

Automated Delivery

Did you know NuGet is more than just a tool to manage dependencies in your software projects? Since NuGet is both a tool and a means of publishing and consuming packages, those packages may be used for scenarios other than the ones we’ve already covered. Agreed, packages contain assemblies by default, but they can also contain PowerShell scripts and other files. What if there were tools out there leveraging this idea?

Meet Octopus and Chocolatey. Both are projects that started early in the NuGet release wave and immediately saw advantage in using NuGet for more than it was originally intended. We’ll cover both tools in this chapter, because they are great for optimizing your deployments. Octopus can be used to deploy your application packages to a variety of test, staging, and production environments and automates deploying to web and database servers. Chocolatey, on the other hand, is a NuGet extension that enables you to distribute and install software packages on a system, distributed through a NuGet feed. It uses NuGet as a system-level package manager, as opposed to NuGet’s default solution-level purpose.