Packaging .msi created via .vdproj

I am wondering about the best path to go down and hoping you have words of advice. We use Jenkins as our build server, and from there I have some compiled .msi’s that I would like to push to Octopus for deployment. I am able to do that no problem for the applications that use WiX to create the installers.

But here is the problem. Most of my application installers are being created using a Visual Studio Installer Project (.vdproj extension). Since everything in these projects is just part of the installation package, they don’t have a way to add external references. Therefore I am not able to add an OctoPack NuGet reference to bundle the .msi into a NuGet package to push to my Octopus server.

Right now my thought has been to run NuGet from the command line during the Jenkins build to pack the .msi and then push it. But that seems to be a pretty clunky way to go about it (though that is pretty much what OctoPack is doing in the background anyway, I believe). Have you had any use cases that are similiar/have any thoughts on the best way to proceed in this case?

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out. Adding a step to you build process to use Nuget.exe would be the way to go, yeah. It is also basically what Octopack does in the background.

Regards,
Dalmiro