Keeping NuGet packages out of TFS

When you start working with Visual Studio 2013 and TFS, by default Visual Studio adds your NuGet packages to TFS Source Control. This works OK but it's a bit backward; the whole point of having NuGet is that it acts as the repository for these packages so your source control system doesn't have to. And for one of my projects packages\ now contains 163 MB which is a lot of lard for source control to handle. So I decided to try and find out how to exclude the packages from TFS and keep them out.

I've read a few posts on how to do this:

• This post from David Ebbo, not much information but explains why to do it and points you in the direction of more information.
• This page from the NuGet documentation.
• Two conversations from Stack Exchange on "Ignoring all NuGet packages" and "Getting TFS to ignore the packages folder"; these didn't provide any new information but were useful for seeing the kind of problems that people were having.

So this is a step-by-step process of how to create a new solution and have (almost) all the packages kept out of TFS.

1. Create a .tfignore file

In the TFS folder that is the parent folder of all my projects I create a ".tfignore" file containing the following:

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*.user *.suo bin obj packages

This instructs TFS to ignore any folder called "packages". Add the file to source control so that all your projects on all your dev machines get the benefit of this.

You would have thought that that is it, but it's not...

2. Create my new project by initially creating an empty solution file

The option to create a Blank Solution is in the "Other Project Types" section:

Close Visual Studio (if you don't do this, it won't work).

3. Add a "nuget.config" in a ".nuget" folder within the new solution

Create a ".nuget" folder within the solution folder and add a "nuget.config" file to it that contains the following:

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<configuration> <solution> <add key="disableSourceControlIntegration" value="true" /> </solution> </configuration>

This is needed to stop NuGet.exe from trying to add packages to source control (it ignores the .tfignore file, a known issue). We want to do this before we add any projects so that NuGet uses our new settings for the packages in the initial project.

4. NOW add your projects to the solution...

In my case I added an MVC project and a Tests project.  I'm hoping that in the Pending Changes window I should see NOTHING being added from the "packages" folder even though my MVC project uses loads of packages.

And this is what I see:

Almost nothing. I can't seem to stop nuget / TFS (whichever one it is that is doing it) from adding the repositories.config to source control.  Fortunately this file is only about 200 bytes as opposed to the 163 MB I was putting in source control before.

If you use Git rather than TFS for source control then the only difference to this process would be that you would need to create a ".gitignore" instead of a ".tfignore" file.