We have our retention period set to keep 1 or 2 copies of NuGet packages associated with deployed releases. But we have noticed it is keeping additional copies of the packages for releases no longer available and we see messages similar to the one below in the raw retention logs.
“portal.18.2.10213.11251 was published on 2/13/2018 7:23:53 PM +00:00. It will be kept because the project Enterprise uses #{…} references in the package ID field and has deployed a package with this id before.”
Can anyone explain what this message may be actually telling me? Why it would keep the NuGet package it refers to even though it no longer has an associated release.
What this is telling you is that there is a dynamic package reference in this project, so rather than defining the exact version of the package you want to deploy for each release this is being selected dynamically. The side effect is that we currently have no way of identifying, once a package has been deployed, if those packages will ever be needed again so we end up retaining them forever.
We currently have an issue open about this problem (#4178), which we are working on a resolution for. Hopefully we should have a solution for you shortly, in the meantime if you are positive that you will not need these packages again they can be manually removed without causing any issues for your Octopus Server.