How I push GoogleAnalyticsTracker to NuGet

If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleAnalyticsTracker, lives on GitHub and NuGet and has since evolved into something that supports Windows Phone and Windows RT as well. But let’s not focus on the open-source aspect.

It’s funny how things evolve. GoogleAnalyticsTracker started as a small component inside MyGet, and since a couple of weeks it uses MyGet to publish itself to NuGet. Say what? In this blog post, I’ll elaborate a bit on the development tools used on this tiny component.

Source code

Source code for GoogleAnalyticsTracker can be found on GitHub. This is the main entry point to all activity around this “project”. If you have a nice addition, feel free to fork it and send me a pull request.

Staging NuGet packages

Whenever I update the source code, I want to automatically build it and publish NuGet packages for it. Not directly to NuGet: I want to keep the regular version, the WinRT and WP version more or less in sync regarding version numbers. Also, I sometimes miss something which I fix again 5 minutes after. In the meanwhile, I like to have the generated package on some sort of “staging” feed, at MyGet. It’s even public, check http://www.myget.org/F/githubmaarten if you want to use my development artifacts.

When I decide it’s time for these packages to move to the “official NuGet package repository” at NuGet.org, I simply click the “push” button in my MyGet feed. Yes, that’s a manual step but I wanted to have some “gate” in the middle where I should explicitly do something. Here’s what happens after clicking “push”:

That’s right! You can use MyGet as a staging feed and from there push your packages onwards to any other feed out there. MyGet takes care of the uploading.

Building the package

There’s one thing which I forgot… How do I build these packages? Well… I don’t. I let MyGet Build Services.do the heavy lifting. On your feed, you can simply click the “Add GitHub project” button and a list of all your GitHub repos will be shown:

Tick a box and you’re ready to roll. And if you look carefully, you’ll see a “Build hook URL” being shown:

Back on GitHub, there’s this concept of “service hooks”, basically small utilities that you can fire whenever a new commit occurs on your repository. Wouldn’t it be awesome to trigger package creation on MyGet whenever I check in code to GitHub? Guess what…

That’s right! And MyGet even runs unit tests. Some sort of a continuous integration where I have the choice to promote packages to NuGet whenever I think they are stable.

This is an imported post. It was imported from my old blog using an automated tool and may contain formatting errors and/or broken images.