Using a package manager in the CI/CD process

A package manager is a central repository to centralize and share packages, development libraries, tools, and software.

For consumer clients that use package managers, the benefit is the possibility to track, update, install, and remove installed packages.

There are many public package managers, such as NuGet, Node Package Manager (npm), Maven, Bower, and Chocolatey, that provide frameworks or tools for developers in different languages and platforms.

The following screenshot is from the NuGet package manager, which publicly provides more than 150,000 .NET frameworks:

Figure 7.2 – NuGet package manager

One of the advantages for the developer of using this type of package manager is that they don't have to store the packages with the application sources but can make them a reference in a configuration file so that the packages will be automatically retrieved.

In an enterprise application...