Starting ASP.NET5 on Linux, Part 1

by Vitor Fernandes — on  , 

Future is looking bright. Options, options and more options. After seeing a few presentations on the new ASP.NET platform, I have to say it looks a lot like Node.js - it certainly took a lot of inspiration from it!

First off, I went into http://get.asp.net, clicked Install for Linux and downloaded the DNX tar file. After extracting it, we get two executables:

  • dnx, a .net execution environment, which contains the code necessary to bootstrap and run an application
  • dnu, the .net development utitlity, which manages project dependency packages

But what about this dnvm I hear about? I already went throught some difficulties with running Node.js without using sudo all the time and solved it by using nvm, so of course I wanted dnvm. So I headed into the detailed install instructions.

That’s where problems start, but it is entirely my fault. I’m using fish shell instead of plain old boring bash, so once in a while, some shell scripts don’t work. No worries, drop into bash shell for a while and re-run the command to install:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aspnet/Home/dev/dnvminstall.sh | DNX_BRANCH=dev sh && source ~/.dnx/dnvm/dnvm.sh

and lo and behold, I got dnvm on the path to call upon wherever I want. Back into fish then. Or so I thought. This was going too easy. Simply sourcing the dnvm.sh script into my fish prompt doesn’t work. Fortunately, took 2-3 minutes googling around to find this repo on github which has custom fish functions to make dnvm, dnx and dnu work in the fish shell. Downloaded them and put them on my ~/.config/fish/functions folder and everything is working again, without going into bash shell. Sweet!

Next up, let’s install a runtime. So I did dnx --help and saw there was an install option, as expected. Second mistake. Why does dnvm install dnx for MONO by default??? What I really need to do to install the latest Core CLR is:

dnvm upgrade -r coreclr

Better read the instructions from now on. So next I installed libuv from source, as shown on the install docs. Looks like we are all set for now. Let’s move on to some coding.

I don’t see any tutorial for Linux, so I jump into the Your first ASP.NET 5 Application on a Mac - I guess if we are not Windows, we must be OSX! Following along the tuturial, looks like I need to install a yeoman generator for ASP.NET. I already have npm and yeoman, so no problem there, just business as usual.

Then I fire up Visual Studio Code (I already had that one installed) and try dnx: Restore Packages as instructed, just to find out I need something called OmniSharp server running and it is not. Going into Help -> Toggle Developer Tools, I get some error messages telling me I need Mono version >=4.0.1. There is no escaping it!

This is taking longer than I anticipated, so I’m going to split this into 2 parts. Don’t miss out on Part 2, where I will be compiling and running the ASP.NET sample project.

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