How to remove the nuget Packages folder from TFS?

Question

I just went through a dll hell. Turns out that TFS has been synchronizing packages, and I ended up with two versions of Microsoft.Web.Optimization and its dependencies at once. NuGet was convinced that I have the newest versions installed, and even reinstallation changed nothing. But at the same time, my projects wouldn't build or, if they'd build, they wouldn't start, complaining that they can't find the library version given in the manifest.

I managed to solve it by uninstalling the packages from NuGet console, physically removing their folders from the hard disc, and then doing a fresh build (which re-installed the missing latest versions). But the package folders I deleted manually are still sitting around in the Source Control Explorer. And I can't delete them, the Delete button is greyed out when I select one of them. I am afraid that they will come again when I get newest version next time.

How do I prevent it? I would like to remove them from the solution completely. In the worst case, it would be OK to ignore them, but as they are on a level above the projects, I can't enter them into a project's .tfignore file, and Visual Studio didn't let me add a .tfignore file to the solution itself.

Do a Forced Get latest version on the the Packages folder. It won't be grayed out after that. Delete it then. — Hamid Shahid, May 22 '14 at 13:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 03 '14 at 22:08

1

Would it be an option to not checking in the Packages folder to TFS? NuGet now supports automatic package restore, which automatically restores packages on build.

Here is doc for migrating to this new model: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/migrating-to-automatic-package-restore.

And this may save you a lot of hassle with checked-in packages folder.

answered Jun 03 '14 at 22:08

Dan Liu

812
5
1

I know this is an old post, the issue is that TFS should not be tracking the packages folder at all, as OP rightly states, it causes all sorts of inconsistencies and chews up your bandwidth. It's the package restore mechanism that falls over when TFS tries to maintain the packages folder for you. – Chris Schaller Nov 13 '17 at 04:54

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 13 '17 at 05:24

Arguably best answered in this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40409464/1690217

The NuGet documentation provides instructions on how to accomplish this and I just followed them successfully for Visual Studio 2015 against VSTS (Azure-hosted TFS). Everything is fully updated as of Nov 2016. This also still works for Visual Studio 2017 RTM (March 2017).

I added the following files as explained above:

.tfignore

\packages
!\packages\repositories.config

.nuget\nugget.config

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <solution>
    <add key="disableSourceControlIntegration" value="true" />
  </solution>
</configuration>

I had to delete the packages folder and checkin the delete, then package restore will kickin and rebuild the folder but VS will no longer automatically add it to source control.

How to remove the nuget Packages folder from TFS?

2 Answers2