Using a Jenkins Promoted Job to Publish to NuGet

We've started publishing our .NET API Client library via NuGet. While each build is published to a private MyGet repository, we wanted to approve the versions that get published to the primary NuGet feed, including a chance to bump up version numbers based on semantic versioning concerns before the world started using a particular build. There is a Promoted Builds Plugin available for Jenkins that allows action to be taken on a build based on criteria that include "manual approval", and it turns out this plugin is pretty easy to setup for this need:

• Set a Jenkins variable for your NuGet API key.  I set it in Jenkins' global configuration.
• Make sure NuGet is available to your build process. Perhaps check in the .nuget directory with the EXE. We have a separate repo that contains solely the nuget tool, which we clone before use.
• Install the Promoted Builds Plugin from Jenkins' management page.
• Have your job produce a .nupkg file (With symbols!) and archive it as an artifact.
• Setup the promotion job.
  • We chose to wait for both manual approval AND the completion of downstream tests.
  • Setup a promoted job step to copy the .nupkg artifacts from the main job. Specify the jenkins variable $PROMOTED_JOB for the build number of the upstream job.
  • In a shell or batch step, call NuGet.exe push $NUPKG $NUGET_API_KEY

Once that's done, you can touch off the promotion from the job's "Promotion Status" screen, as well as view the promotion job status and log.