How to include files within a nuget package

Sami C.
1 min readApr 9, 2020

I had an idea for quite a while now that involved the process of creating a NuGet package with (html) template files included in it. I wasn’t quite sure how to get my HTML files included in a NuGet package…so my search began…

Step 1: Set your files as an embedded resource

Set your build action of the files that you want included on“Embedded resource”

Step 2: Accessing the files from within the library

var assembly = typeof(MyLib.MyClass).GetTypeInfo().Assembly;Stream resource = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("MyLib.SomeFolder.MyTemplate.cshtml");StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(resource);
string text = reader.ReadToEnd(); //hello world!

Notice how the path to the file is separated by dots. The dots are representing the file structure. MyLib/SomeFolder/MyTemplate.cshtml is how can you look at it.

So…what did we achieve?

We’re now able to deploy our library in a NuGet package and use it in any other project with the files embedded in our dll! In my case this is handy as I have some predefined HTML templates in my library. These will be used across multiple projects for some PDF generation. That does the job for me!

Enjoy!

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