ASP.NET vNext and Mac OS X

— 3 minute read

One of the highlights of ASP.NET vNext is that it will be cross-platform. What this means is a few things...

  • No more need for Windows VMs (designers will be happy)
  • Potential for cheaper hosting, can run ASP.NET on Linux
  • Open to more developers (plus benefits of open source also)
  • It's pretty cool.

Installing DNVM / DNX

The first place to go is here: https://github.com/aspnet/Home

This will outline the ideas behind the next version of ASP.NET and offer some instructions for install. Below are the outlines.

The key to getting set up is something called the .NET Version Manager (DNVM), which is a command line tool you use to download DNX (.NET execution environment). The DNX contains the code to bootstrap and run our applications.

A lot of this is built into the latest preview of Visual Studio 2015.

The steps to install DNVM on OS X are far easier if we have Homebrew installed. So to get that we need to run:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

To install the DNVM:

brew tap aspnet/dnx
brew update
brew install dnvm

Then, we need to ensure that the command is registered with our bash profile:

echo "source dnvm.sh" >> ~/.bashrc

You can run DNVM to get the latest version of DNX so that we can run our applications:

dnvm upgrade

Creating an app

Now we should have ASP.NET available to us on our Mac. The next thing we want to do is create a test application. To do this, we can use Yeoman to generate this for us. There are a few dependencies... so, to set these up we need to do some more command line entries.

Install node.js:

brew install node

Install Yeoman:

npm install -g yo

Install generator-aspnet

npm install -g generator-aspnet

Details of the ASP.NET vNext generator are here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/generator-aspnet

Now that we have the yo generator, we can type this into a command prompt:

yo aspnet

... and what you should end up with is something that looks like this:

generator-aspnet on OS X

Pretty cool huh?! In this example, I am going to choose to create a real basic console application, but the templates allow you to create web applications also.

After answering a few questions, we should have something that we can run and obtain the output from our test console application:

dnu restore
dnx . run
Running vNext on OS X

And that just about sums up how to get started with ASP.NET vNext on OS X.