Which NuGet.exe do dotnet.exe and MSBuild.exe use?

[Bartleby2718]

I use .NET 8.0.2 on Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. I have basically the same question but for both dotnet.exe and MSBuild.exe.

1. dotnet

dotnet restore allows you to restore NuGet packages. I suppose it uses NuGet.exe under the hood. If I run dotnet nuget --version, I get:

NuGet Command Line
6.9.1.3

Where is this value coming from? Is there a NuGet.exe bundled with the .NET SDK?

FWIW where dotnet gives me C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe, but I didn't find any NuGet.exe in C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\8.0.205.

2. MSBuild

MSbuild.exe -t:Restore allows you to restore NuGet packages. I suppose it also uses NuGet.exe, but I'm not sure where it is. I see that C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe is bundled with VS 2022, but I don't see a NuGet.exe.

Thanks in advance!

[Bartleby2718]

@zivkan Do you happen to know the answer to this question as well?

[zivkan]

no, the .NET SDK and VS/msbuild does not ship nuget.exe.

NuGet.exe is a ILMerge of a bunch of NuGet.*.dll, plus a few additional nuget.exe specific commands. VS/MSBuild and the .NET SDK have all those NuGet.*.dlls (easy to find in the .NET SDK install directory), and they use these dlls directly.

[Bartleby2718]

Thanks @zivkan!

Sharing more details for future reference:

• For VS 2022: I see 6.9.2 if I hover all any NuGet.*.dll file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\NuGet, and this matches the version I see for NuGet Package Manager when I go to Help - About Microsoft Visual Studio.
• For the .NET 8 SDK: I see 6.9.1 if I hover all any NuGet.*.dll file in C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\8.0.205, and this matches the version I see when I run dotnet nuget --version.

[chriskloe]

What do I do when I want to call nuget.exe setapikey? Any other way how to specify that? dotnet nuget does not support this option.
Background: I need to do this on a CI/CD server (jenkins) in order to authenticate at the nuget store (gitlab)

[zivkan]

dotnet nuget push has an --api-key option. You can also upvote this issue:

• Get push API key from environment variable #12539

[chriskloe]

It seemed I need to set an apikey also for dotnet restore.
I managed to test it: did not work though. Maybe there's something weird with my gitlab configuration.

[zivkan]

nuget has only ever used "api keys" for push. If you need credentials for restore, that's different. Info of authenticating to private feeds can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/nuget/consume-packages/consuming-packages-authenticated-feeds