Deploying a T4 Template with dotnet pack

In this post I will show how to deploy a T4 Template to a target project using a NuGet package built with dotnet CLI pack command.

Introduction

Recently I had to distribute a T4 template inside a NuGet package, so developers who installed the NuGet package would get, in addition to the library assemblies, a T4 template to help generate some scaffold code.

Nowadays there are two main ways to build a NuGet package: creating a .nuspec file or defining the package properties directly inside your .csproj.

The project that I want to distributed via NuGet is a .NET Standard library, so I decided to use the the dotnet core way: define the package properties inside the .csproj file.

Creating the NuGet project

We will create a sample project to use during the post. Open a command-line/terminal and type:

Let’s say that the T4 Template that we want to distribute is located inside a folder called Templates and the file is named Scaffold.tt.

Now open the SampleNugetProject.csproj in the Visual Studio and add a T4 Template:

Add new item…

Our Solution Explorer should look like this:

Creating a .targets

We need to create a .targets file, it will be used to copy the T4 Template from the NuGet package folder to the target project in the build process:

Create a file with the same name of your NuGet package project, but with the extensions .targets.

For our sample the file will be SampleNugetProject.targets:

Changing the .csproj

In the project .csproj just add this ItemGroup:

Building the NuGet package

Inside the folder where are our .csproj and .targets files, type:

This will create a file bin\Debug\SampleNugetProject.1.0.0.nupkg.

Testing the NuGet package

Create a new .NET Core project to test the package:

Now, add the NuGet package to the target project.

To test our NuGet package without publish it to a NuGet source, just use the --source option and point it to the SampleNugetProject.1.0.0.nupkg folder.

If we look to our TargetTestProject there is no Scaffold.tt file yet, this is because it will copied from NuGet package folder to the project structure during the build process.

Just build the target project and the Scaffold.tt will be copied.

Conclusion

That’s it, now we have created a NuGet package that copy a T4 Template to target project’s structure.

You can expand this solution to copy other kind of files to the target project.

If you want to dig deeper into generating NuGet packages using dotnet-cli, starts with Create a NuGet package using the dotnet CLI.