Deploying your ASP.NET MVC3 site on Mono

In this blog post I am going to show you how easy it is to create a new ASP.NET MVC site and deploy it on Linux/Mono.

Step 1 – Create project
Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project. Compile and run it.

Step 2 – Add assemblies needed by Mono
Add references:
System.Web.WebPages
System.Web.WebPages.Deployment
System.Web.WebPages.Razor

Step 3 – Copy local
Make sure to set “Copy Local” to True for all of the following assemblies:
System.Web.Helpers
System.Web.Mvc
System.Web.Razor (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\System.Web.Razor.dll)
System.Web.Routing
System.Web.WebPages
System.Web.WebPages.Deployment
System.Web.WebPages.Razor

Remove Entity Framework and other unnecessary assemblies.

Step 4 – Publish your site
Publish it to a directory and copy it to your Linux server

Step 5 – Get latest Mono and compile it from source
I run Ubuntu 11.10 on my server. Ubuntu has Mono 2.10.6 in its repository, which is quite new, but Mono is moving so fast so I recommend getting the latest version and compiling it from source. The latest version at the time of writing is 2.10.8. Nathan Bridgewater has created a script to simplify this process, if you are running Ubuntu, this is what you will need to run to install Mono:

mkdir mono-2.10
cd mono-2.10
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/nathanb/iws-snippets/raw/master/mono-install-scripts/ubuntu/install_mono-2.10.sh
chmod 755 install_mono-2.10.sh
./install_mono-2.10.sh

It will take a while to compile it, so now is the time to go grab a cup of coffee.

Step 6 – Run your site with xsp4
Mono have a development web server called xsp4, the first thing we are going to do is to run our site in xsp4 to make sure it works. Mono has been installed to /opt, but does not exist in our PATH, so before we can run Mono we need to setup the mono enviroment variables. To do that I found a script somewhere on the internets, monoenv.sh:

MONO_PREFIX=/opt/mono-2.10
export DYLD_LIBRARY_FALLBACK_PATH=/lib:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:/opt/mono-2.10/lib:
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/include:/include
export ACLOCAL_PATH=/share/aclocal
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/lib/pkgconfig:/lib/pkgconfig
export PATH=/bin:/opt/mono-2.10/bin:$PATH

At your bash prompt type: source monoenv.sh

Now cd into the directory where you have your published web site and run xsp4.