Installing MVC3 on Mono with Ubuntu

April 22, 2013

I managed to get the wiki engine I spend a lot of more spare time writing, Roadkill working on Ubuntu with Mono this weekend. Unfortunately for me, a lot of the documentation is patchy which meant it took a few hours to get it up and running by scouring Stackoverflow, blogs and news groups. It is infact very simple to get MVC3 working with Apache on Linux, provided you have the right Apache config settings and are willing to add a few hacks into your code to cater for the gaps (NotImplementedExceptions) in the Mono framework.

Below are two snippets for getting Mono and MVC3 going with Ubuntu. The majority of the credit goes to:

Copy the second snippet into /var/www/default.txt and save the first snippet as “install.sh” into your user directory, running it using “sudo sh install.sh”. The full Roadkill bash script can be found here. I started making EC2 AMIs for the installation, and then found a few issues that made me eventually abandon my dreams of a cheap $5 Roadkill Ubuntu server, as it would be a lot of effort maintaining both Windows and Mono tests for Roadkill.

Don’t take that as criticism of Mono + MVC3 though - Roadkill does a lot with the framework that most apps wouldn’t. If you are running data-driven MVC apps, then using a database like MongoDB would work very well with Mono on Ubuntu.

	sudo apt-get -y update

	# Install Apache, Mono and mod_mono.
	# mod_mono may freeze here. If it does, open a new shell and restart apache 2:
	# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
	sudo apt-get -y install apache2
	sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
	sudo apt-get -y install mono-devel mono-runtime
	sudo apt-get -y install mono-apache-server4
	sudo apt-get -y install libapache2-mod-mono

	# update permissions for r,w,exec for user + group
	sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www
	sudo chown -R www-data /var/www
	sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www

	# Replace the default apache site settings
	sudo mv /var/www/default.txt /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
	sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

	# Install UFW (uncomplicated firewall)
	sudo apt-get -y install ufw

	# Allow SSH and HTTP traffic
	sudo ufw enable
	sudo ufw allow 22
	sudo ufw allow 80
	sudo ufw allow proto tcp to any port 135
	sudo ufw allow proto udp to any port 137
	sudo ufw allow proto udp to any port 138
	sudo ufw allow proto tcp to any port 139
	sudo ufw allow proto tcp to any port 445

view raw gistfile1.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	AddHandler mono .aspx ascx .asax ashx .config .cs asmx .axd
	MonoDebug default true
	MonoSetEnv default MONO_IOMAP=all
	MonoApplications "/:/var/www"
	MonoServerPath default /usr/bin/mod-mono-server4

	DocumentRoot /var/www
	<Directory />
	Options FollowSymLinks
	AllowOverride None
	</Directory>
	<Directory /var/www/>
	Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
	AllowOverride None
	Order allow,deny
	allow from all
	SetHandler mono
	</Directory>

	<DirectoryMatch "/(bin\|App_Code\|App_Data\|App_GlobalResources\|App_LocalResources)/">
	Order deny,allow
	Deny from all
	</DirectoryMatch>

	# remove this section if you don't need it
	ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
	<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
	AllowOverride None
	Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
	Order allow,deny
	Allow from all
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

	# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
	# alert, emerg.
	LogLevel warn

	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
	</VirtualHost>

view raw gistfile1.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

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I'm Chris Small, a software engineer working in London. This is my tech blog. Find out more about me via Github, Stackoverflow, Resume