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Paket is a dependency manager for .NET ecosystems, developed by the F# Community Project Incubation Space, that streamlines the acquisition and resolution of external libraries by combining NuGet package handling with direct git repository references. Released in version 10.3.1 as the second major iteration, the tool is designed for developers who need deterministic, reproducible builds across large solutions or multi-project repositories. It parses a single paket.dependencies file to compute an optimal package graph, locks exact versions inside paket.lock, and then injects assembly references into MSBuild projects without modifying *.csproj or *.fsproj files directly. This approach eliminates “package version hell” by ensuring that every build machine, CI pipeline, and teammate obtains identical binaries, even when packages are restored days or months apart. Typical use cases include enterprise applications that rely on strict auditing rules, open-source libraries that must build on multiple .NET SDK versions, and micro-service repositories where many projects share a coherent dependency set but still allow selective overrides. Because Paket supports both public NuGet feeds and private git sources, teams can consume internal components that are not yet published as formal packages, or pin to a specific commit of an upstream library for hot-fix scenarios. The utility integrates with standard commands such as paket install, paket update, and paket simplify, and it works transparently with Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider, dotnet CLI, and legacy Xamarin workflows. Compared with the default PackageReference mechanism, Paket offers finer control over transitive dependencies, content files, and framework-specific constraints, making it popular in F# communities and increasingly adopted by C# solutions that value lock-file reproducibility. The software is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources (e.g. winget), always delivering the latest version, and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.
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