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Looking for advice on Best Practice
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We have an OnPrem Proget server.
When our devs after working they may find that they need to modify a package to allow the app they are actually working on to work. This means that we can end up with a number of Prerelease builds of packages on the server as they need to get to there so they can be properly fetched during the build of the target app.
Is there an accepted Code of Practice for managing prerelease stuff? Do people publish prerelease stuff to a different feed and only post the released stuff to the more public feed? Or is it just expected that once the release is out that the prerelease builds are simply removed from the feed?
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Is there an accepted Code of Practice for managing prerelease stuff?
Yes, the general rules to follow are these:
- Packages are immutable; do not delete/republish packages as part of your normal workflow
- Use Prerelease Packages & Repackaging to take tested/validated prerelease packages to stable packages
- Use Package Promotion to move packages across feeds
- Use Retention Rules to automatically cleanup unused prerelease packages
Do people publish prerelease stuff to a different feed and only post the released stuff to the more public feed? Or is it just expected that once the release is out that the prerelease builds are simply removed from the feed?
Yes to both
On our ProGet Instance, we use both patterns.
- Extensions (plugins) have two feeds: Extensions (Stable) and PrereleaseExtensions; the reason is that we use CI (build automation), and publish a new package on every commit, and these could be really unstable - we don't want anyone using a prerelease extension unless we explicitly point them to it
- Our NuGet libraries have one feed (NuGetLibraries) that has both prerelease and release packages; these are not intended for anyone other than Inedo Engineers, and we have policies, practices, and training in place to make prerelease packages are shipped appropriately
My advice for deciding which pattern to follow would be looking at the consumers of your feeds/packages (i.e. who uses your packages vs who publishes your packages).
Using a single feed that has release and prerelease packages requires more training for developers. If one of your developers accidently uses a prerelease package and commits that, then it's going to cause problems. Even if you catch it before production, it will waste time and resources.
