Fundamentals

Working on multiple projects often implies similar requirements for the build implementations. A quick and easy solution would be to copy the necessary files across all repositories. However, this can cause technical debt to grow over time. For instance, as soon as the unit testing is extended with a coverage tool, all these copies would need to be updated. Even worse, there is a high chance of ending up with divergent implementations when updating these copies becomes too time-consuming facing critical deadlines.

Naturally, builds written with NUKE are part of the repository and consist of pure C#. That allows to use two very pragmatic yet powerful approaches of maintaining builds in separate submodules or shipping compiled assemblies via NuGet packages. Furthermore, NUKE provides two additional strategies, namely pre-build download of external files and builds as global tools, which will be covered more thoroughly in the next sections.

For now, here is a short comparison:

Strategy	Build Versioning	Build Extensibility	Maintenance Impact
Submodules	Yes, including branches	Difficult	Normal
NuGet Packages	Yes	Yes, via class inheritance	High
External Files	Yes, if supported by URL scheme	Yes, via partial declarations	Low
Global Tools	Yes	No	High