Fixing .NET Core package restore problems

August 29, 2016

I had this problem today where a dotnet restore was failing on a Linux CI server, but working on my Windows 10 dev machine. The error was:

Unable to resolve ‘System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters (>= 4.0.0-rc4-24217-03)’ for ‘.NETCoreApp,Version=v1.0’.

It turns out I had this package in C:\Users\MyUsername\.nuget\packages so it restored locally, but on the internet the package isn’t at nuget.org. How did I get it originally? That was a mystery that luckily another project in the solution solved by accident.

A lot of the .NET Core nuget packages are hosted on myget.org until they’re ready to be fed over to nuget.org. The solution is to add a nuget.config file to your project, with this:

<configuration>
  <packageSources>
    <add key="nuget.org" value="https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json" protocolVersion="3" />
    <add key="dotnet-core" value="https://dotnet.myget.org/F/dotnet-core/api/v3/index.json" />
  </packageSources>
</configuration>

One hour of my life wasted to save you 1 hour! The myget feed is currently on dotnet.myget.org

.net-corenuget

I'm Chris Small, a software engineer working in London. This is my tech blog. Find out more about me via Github, Stackoverflow, Resume