Happy 10th Birthday, NuGet!

Christopher

NuGet 1.0 was released on January 13th, 2011 – 10 years and 4 major version releases ago. Since then, NuGet.org has grown to host a large and vibrant package ecosystem with over 230 thousand unique packages.

To illustrate just much how the .NET ecosystem has grown, it’s interesting to know that NuGet.org first reached 1 billion total package downloads in 2016. Today, NuGet.org serves 1 billion downloads a week for a total of 78 billion total downloads!

NuGet as a product is also constantly growing to meet the evolving needs of .NET developers, supporting them with a rich gallery experience on NuGet.org, cross-platform package management in the .NET CLI, and a powerful GUI experience in Visual Studio. When NuGet 1.0 was first released in 2011, it contained ~220,000 lines of source code. Today, between NuGet.org and our client tools, NuGet contains a whopping ~790,000 lines of source code!

We want to be clear, we didn’t get here on our own! NuGet has been open-source from the beginning with the goal to “help foster a vibrant open source community on the .NET platform by providing a means for .NET developers to easily share and make use of open source libraries.” NuGet has only grown to its current scale thanks to the efforts of many team members, external contributors, and package authors who have dedicated their time to improving the lives of .NET developers around the world.

To celebrate making it this far, we want to thank and appreciate everyone who’s published a package, submitted a pull request, opened an issue, filled out a survey, engaged with us on Twitter, or otherwise contributed to making NuGet what it is today!

If you would like to help continue to improve NuGet and expand the .NET ecosystem, you can:

Here’s to another 10 years!

The NuGet Team