bubdm / readonlysourcetree

A NuGet package that makes your project build to top-level bin and obj directories.

Read only source tree

This project contains a NuGet package that will cause any project it is installed into to build its primary output and intermediate files to bin and obj directories at the root of your repository instead of as subdirectories to the project directory.

This makes structuring your repository after this pattern much easier:

RepoRoot\
    README.md
    LICENSE
    src\
        solution.sln
        project1\
        project2\
    bin\
        debug\
            project1\
            project2\
    obj\
        debug\
            project1\
            project2\
    packages\
        binary_dependency1\
        binary_dependency2\

This isolation of source files from build outputs can be useful for many reasons, including:

1. Delete all build outputs for your entire repository just by deleting the top level bin and obj folders.
2. Zip up your src directory and only get source -- no binaries.

Additional steps

Identifying the root of your repository

Heuristics are used by default to determine where the root of your repository is. You can see the heuristics in this MSBuild file's definition of the MSBuild RepoRoot property. It looks for files that are commonly found in the root of the repo. If the heuristics don't fit your repository, you can create an empty .RepoSrcRoot file in the top-level src folder of your repository.

Consolidate all NuGet packages

By default NuGet will expand packages to a directory beneath your solution directory. To get it to install packages to a sibling of your src directory instead, create a nuget.config file in the root of your repository with this content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <config>
    <add key="repositorypath" value="packages" />
  </config>
</configuration>