Nuget Package Restore with internet-restricted build servers

The first time I enabled nuget package restore I had a nasty shock: the TeamCity build server didn't have internet access (and wasn't getting any).

I initially went back to storing-packages-in-source-control, but when I created a spike ASP.Net MVC 4 project, which wanted to add some 30 packages, I decided I needed to address the root problem.

A few people suggested I should setup a local nuget repository, the simplest version of which is just to dump all the packages you need into a file share. But how to point the build server at the share, rather than the standard nuget feed URL? Short of logging in as the build server user and changing the settings through Visual Studio (lame), there appear to be a couple of ways:

Editing %appdata%\nuget\nuget.config (for the build server user)

This achieves the same as the above, but you don't have to log in as that user. It's reliable, but because it doesn't 'carry' with the solution in source control it's brittle (needs doing again if the build server user changes etc...) and you can't vary it on a project by project basis, which is a bit limiting.

Editing the generated nuget.targets file that package restore adds to your solution

This looks like the go, and even has comments in there to show you what to change. But I didn't find this reliable. On my local machine (under a no-internet user) this worked just fine, but on my build server I kept having package resolution errors (from a Silverlight 4 project).

Setting the PackageSources build parameter

What the above did show is what MSBuild properties are involved, so I was able to specify that property on the MSBuild command line and that seems to work consistently:

MSBuild mysolution /p:PackageSources=\\server\fileshare

...now finally I have a green light on TeamCity and can go and do something actually productive instead.