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This package generates a static ThisAssembly.Git class with constants for the following Git properties from the current project:

• Commit
• Sha (first 9 chars from Commit)
• Root (normalized to forward slashes)
• Url (if PublishRepositoryUrl=true)
• Branch (from CI environment variables)

This package relies on your project's installed Microsoft.SourceLink.* package reference according to your specific Git-based source control server (such as GitHub, Azure DevOps, BitBucket, etc).

NOTE: from .NET 8 SDK onwards, SourceLink is included by default, so you don't need to add it manually.

The Branch property is populated from environment variables provided by the currently supported CI systems: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, AppVeyor, TeamCity, Travis CI, Circle CI, GitLab CI, Buddy, and Jenkins.

Whenever the CI system provides a pull request number, the branch name is pr[NUMBER], such as pr123. This makes it easy to use it as a semver metadata label.

Note: by default, the values of these constants are populated during "real" builds (that is, not IDE/design-time builds used to populate intellisense). This is to avoid negatively affecting the editor's performance. This means, however, that the properties will seem to always be empty when inspecting them in the IDE (although never at run-time). If you want to force population of these values for design-time builds, set the EnableSourceControlManagerQueries property to true. This property is defined and documented by dotnet/sourcelink.

At the MSBuild level, targets can take a dependency on the provided InitializeGitInformation target, which sets the equivalent properties named:

• RepositoryCommit
• RepositorySha
• RepositoryRoot
• RepositoryUrl
• RepositoryBranch

The names of these properties were chosen on purpose to match the properties used by nuget pack and nugetizer to populate the relevant package metadata.

So if you have a GitHub repository, installing these three packages will ensure you have the proper metadata out of the box and the simplest packaging experience possible:

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.SourceLink.GitHub" />
    <PackageReference Include="ThisAssembly.Git" />
    <PackageReference Include="NuGetizer" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Customizing the generated code

Set the $(ThisAssemblyNamespace) MSBuild property to set the namespace of the generated ThisAssembly root class. Otherwise, it will be generated in the global namespace.

The generated root ThisAssembly class is partial and has no visibility modifier by default, making it internal by default in C#.

You can set the $(ThisAssemblyVisibility) MSBuild property to public to make it public. This will also change all constants to be static readonly properties instead.

Default:

partial class ThisAssembly
{
    public partial class Constants
    {
        public const string Hello = "World";
    }
}

In this case, the compiler will inline the constants directly into the consuming code at the call site, which is optimal for performance for the common usage of constants.

Public:

public partial class ThisAssembly
{
    public partial class Constants
    {
        public static string Hello => "World";
    }
}

This makes it possible for consuming code to remain unchanged and not require a recompile when the the values of ThisAssembly are changed in a referenced assembly.

If you want to keep the properties as constants, you can instead extend the generated code by defining another partial that can modify its visibility as needed (or add new members).

// makes the generated class public
public partial ThisAssembly 
{
    // Nested classes are always public since the outer class 
    // already limits their visibility
    partial class Constants 
    {
        // add some custom constants
        public const string MyConstant = "This isn't configurable via MSBuild";

        // generated code will remain as constants
    }
}

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