The auto-cake build system is a set of standardized build scripts that allow you to build DotNet projects via a Cake build runner.

The script is intentionally prescriptive and relies on adherance to some well-known standards normally found in Visual Studio projects.

AutoCake consists of two parts.

AutoCake.Build is responsible for building a project. Building the project means that any previous output is cleared, the project is compiled, tested and where defined, NuGet packages are built.

The build-script produces Nunit2 compatible test-reports that can be consumed by most CI-servers and can publish the NuGet packages to a NuGet server.

AutoCake.Release is a smart wrapper around the build script. The release script requires that the project uses Git as source versioning tool, that the project follows the GitFlow style of branching and that the GitVersion tool has been properly configured for the project.

GitVersion is able to calculate the project's current version based on the git commits and tags that it finds in the current repository.

The release script will create a release-branch (or reuse an existing branch for the current project version) and attempts to build the project for this release. If that build succeeds, the release is promoted to the master-branch and rebuilt to include the final release-version numbers. Once completed, the release branch is merged back into the development branch and the development version number is incremented.

AutoCake.Unity is a set of build scripts that can intelligently invoke Unity by inspecting the current Unity-Project, finding the correct Unity installation for the build and then invoking either the standard build triggers or a custom scripted build method. These scripts are based on the Cake.Unity addin.

AutoCake.Maven module provides a CakeTool for running maven targets. This allows you to build Java and Scala based projects while still retaining the ability to manage branching and release logic with AutokCake.Release.

AutoCake.TaskAliases contains helper code that allows you to modify pre-defined tasks. These scripts allow you to hook into the predefined build chain of AutoCake without having to rewrite all of the logic from scratch.

You can use the build script to compile and test your code, but you won't be able to actually build any NuGet packages.

"NuGet pack" is intimately mixed up with MSBuild internals. NuGet currently does not work on Linux, and the MSBuild project does not produce standalone releases that may work on Linux, therefore it is impossible to actually produce NuGet packages in a controlled fashion.

The alternative "dotnet pack" command makes no mention of honouring nuspec files and as usual the documentation is thin on how it works internally.