How can I publish my API results but produce a .nupkg for the output?

[julealgon]

I would like to experiment with the idea of packaging our deployable modules from a monorepo as .nupkg files and then use that as the mechanism for installing our projects into various VMs later. This would be somewhat similar to what Octopus Deploy does (or did? not sure if they still use NuGet for that purpose, but that's beside the point): using NuGet packages as the medium for transporting and installing runnable projects, APIs and services.

My question then is: can I customize my projects in a way that when running dotnet pack on them, what is output is a .nupkg file where its contents are the same contents that are usually produced when executing dotnet publish?

I know I could manually produce a .nuspec file and then manually generate NuGet packages from the outputs of dotnet publish for each folder, but this would make our deployment procedure significantly more convoluted. Instead, I wanted to be able to call dotnet pack against the entire solution, and have it produce the packages for the projects that I customized (I'd annotated all irrelevant ones with IsPackable=false), so that I can then just push those packages to one of our internal nuget feeds.

What would the best approach be to achieve this?

From what I've read thus far, this post appears to be the closest thing to what I want to achieve:

• Make it easier to create tool packages that need publish #6321 (comment)

Do you think that would be a good idea for my use case, or should I explore some other alternative here?

Somewhat related:

• NuGet PackTask Does Not Include Xaml Theme Artifacts #5755
• Make it easier to create tool packages that need publish #6321
• Allow Pack to use publish output, not just build output #12291

Originally posted here:

• How can I publish my API results but produce a `.nupkg` for the output? dotnet/msbuild#12746 (reply in thread)