Getting Started with .NET 5 on Linux!

Disclaimer Link to heading

I haven’t seriously written any .NET since college… I try to avoid Windows like the plague… But with the news (kind old news by now) that CoreCLR is now under the MIT license and Linux support is a priority I can’t help but be interested (so many great game engines with C# bindings… F# is awesome… blah blah…)

So here’s a quickstart to getting setup… It’s not a guideline to C# or F# or building any kind of application. Just the answer to “how the hell do I get this on my machine?”

DO IT. Link to heading

First step, install Mono.

The new .NET has an awesome build tool… It’s going to be called the DNVM (Dot Net Version Manager) but at the time of this writing it’s not stable yet… An older code-named version of the DNVM is called the KVM (confusing yet?).

If it’s much past the writing of this, maybe check out Microsoft’s example projects and check the updated instructions. For now though, if you want the stable kvm do the following:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aspnet/Home/master/kvminstall.sh | sh && source ~/.k/kvm/kvm.sh

This will curl down an install script, run it, and then run a shell script that was installed to your home directory to launch the version manager. The install script handle adding the source ~/.k/kvm/kvm.sh to your .bashrc or .zshrc so as long as you’re using bash or zshell you shouldn’t have to run that manually again.

Next, get the latest version of the KRE (the runtime environment, soon to be called the DNRE).

kvm upgrade

That’s it! You’ve got it. If you want to try out some example code clone down the Home project (linked above too).

git clone https://github.com/aspnet/Home.git

The examples run on a web server named Kestrel. To get it running:

cd Home/
kpm restore # kpm is the package manager
cd samples/HelloMvc
k kestrel

IF YOU HIT AN ERROR ABOUT LIBUV:

Install gyp through your package manager and then

wget http://dist.libuv.org/dist/v1.0.0-rc1/libuv-v1.0.0-rc1.tar.gz
tar -xvf libuv-v1.0.0-rc1.tar.gz
cd libuv-v1.0.0-rc1/
./gyp_uv.py -f make -Duv_library=shared_library
make -C out
sudo cp out/Debug/lib.target/libuv.so /usr/lib/libuv.so.1.0.0-rc1
sudo ln -s libuv.so.1.0.0-rc1 /usr/lib/libuv.so.1

Then try running k kestrel again.

BAM! You’re up and running. The web app is running at http://localhost:5004