globalPackagesFolder repositoryPath difference

The globalPackagesFolder is a global cache of NuGet packages. This is where NuGet downloads NuGet packages to as a machine cache. NuGet may clean out the cache when too many packages are stored here.

The repositoryPath is the packages directory a solution will use. It is usually a path relative to the solution. It can however be a global folder on your machine but typically it would not be the same as NuGet's global machine cache.

As it stands today, it seems the two settings do the same, but globalPackagesFolder has to be used for projects using PackageReference, repositoryPath is for projects using packages.config.