# Building Local NuGet Packages

To build NuGet packages, one can use the `CreateNugetPackages` target:

Windows

```
.\build.ps1 CreateNugetPackages
```

Linux/macOS

```
./build.sh CreateNugetPackages
```

Or if you have Nuke's [dotnet global tool](https://nuke.build/docs/getting-started/installation/) installed:

```
nuke CreateNugetPackages
```

The produced NuGet packages will be placed in the `artifacts\nuget` directory.

> [!NOTE]
> The rest of this document will assume that you have the Nuke global tool installed, as the invocation is the same on all platforms. You can always replace `nuke` in the instructions below with the `build` script relvant to your platform.

By default the packages will be built in debug configuration. To build in relase configuration add the `--configuration` parameter, e.g.:

```
nuke CreateNugetPackages --configuration Release
```

To configure the version of the built packages, add the `--force-nuget-version` parameter, e.g.:

```
nuke CreateNugetPackages --force-nuget-version 11.4.0
```

## Building to the Local Cache

Building packages with the `CreateNugetPackages` target has a few gotchas:

- One needs to set up a local nuget feed to consume the packages
- When building on an operating system other than macOS, the Avalonia.Native package will not be built, resulting in a NuGet error when trying to use Avalonia.Desktop
- It's easy to introduce versioning problems

For these reasons, it is possible to build Avalonia directly to your machine's NuGet cache using the `BuildToNuGetCache` target:

```bash
nuke --target BuildToNuGetCache --configuration Release
```

This command will generate nuget packages and push them into your local NuGet cache (usually `~/.nuget/packages`) with a version of  `9999.0.0-localbuild`.

Each time local changes are made to Avalonia, running this command again will replace the old packages and reset the cache, meaning that the changes should be picked up automatically by msbuild.