Aws-lambda-dotnet: dotnet-lambda package needs a --no-restore option

[Aerendel]

The dotnet lambda package (and by extension, this could apply to any other dotnet-lambda command that runs dotnet publish under the hood) could benefit from a --no-restore option that would be passed to the dotnet publish command.

Since 2.0, build and publish commands run a restore implicitly, so the dotnet team added a --no-restore flag for scenarios where you do not want an implicit restore. This is a really important functionality for CI scenarios where we are restoring from an internal Nuget repository and need to have control of package sources at build time. A typical CI build in this scenario would look like this:

dotnet restore -s https://private-nuget-repository.myorg.com
dotnet lambda package --no-restore

[normj]

With the 2.1.0 version of Amazon.Lambda.Tools you can use the --msbuild-parameters switch to pass arguments to the dotnet publish command. So you can run

dotnet lambda package --msbuild-parameters "--no-restore"

[Aerendel]

@normj thanks for the information! Was this actually documented anywhere? Because I did try and look for different options that were available but I did not find anything in the CLI help or in this repository's readme files - so I would love to know if I missed something entirely, or if this is an opportunity to improve the documentation.

[normj]

This was done just recently for another GitHub issue. https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-dotnet/issues/210

If you do dotnet lambda help package you can see the switch

> dotnet lambda help package                                                                                                          
AWS Lambda Tools for .NET Core functions (2.1.1)                                                                                      
Project Home: https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-dotnet                                                                                

package:                                                                                                                              
   Command to package a Lambda project into a zip file ready for deployment                                                           

   dotnet lambda package [arguments] [options]                                                                                        
   Arguments:                                                                                                                         
      <ZIP-FILE> The name of the zip file to package the project into                                                                 
   Options:                                                                                                                           
      -pl    | --project-location             The location of the project, if not set the current directory will be assumed           
      -c     | --configuration                Configuration to build with, for example Release or Debug (Default Value: Release)      
      -f     | --framework                    Target framework to compile, for example netcoreapp2.0 (Default Value: netcoreapp2.0)   
      --msbuild-parameters                    Additional msbuild parameters passed to the 'dotnet publish' command                    
      -o     | --output-package               The output zip file name                                                                
      -dvc   | --disable-version-check        Disable the .NET Core version check. Only for advanced usage.                           
 C:\temp\NoPublish\src\NoPublish                                                                                                      
>                                                                                                                                     

Admittedly it was added to pass in msbuild parameters but the --no-restore switch works as well. Maybe I should have named it something different.

Another thing to follow is the RELEASE.CHANGELOG.md which you can see on the release last week was when the switch was introduced.

[phillip-haydon]

@normj ah you're a life-saver.

The documentation should be updated to specify how the build parameter argument should constructed. I didn't put quote marks around mine and didn't know why it was failing. No doco on AWS website, and wasn't sure from tool help. Solution was found here.

[normj]

Good call out about reminding people to quote the value.