This post is a quick summary of my first steps in creating a development environment and setting up a server for ASP.NET MVC on Linux. Tools of the trade will be Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), the nginx web server and XSP’s FastCGI server. I’ll assume you have a working setup featuring nginx and MySQL on your server – configuring these is beyond the scope of this article.

Mono.GetLastVersion();

Ubuntu depends on Mono quite a lot, so don’t expect to find the latest and greatest version in your package manager. There is some comfort in the form of Badgerports, but it’s LTS-only, and it’s usually a bit behind the latest Mono stable. The solution is to compile Mono from source, which is actually a lot easier than it sounds.

The whole process is made easy by a nice shell script written by Patrick McEvoy which does all the heavy lifting. The script is nicely written, so if you don’t like running random stuff from the web as root (and you shouldn’t!), feel free to take a peek, see what it does and do the whole thing by hand.

Clone the Git repo or fetch the script directly from GitHub and see what the script does by typing ./mono_build.sh -h (you’ll have to chmod +x mono-build-sh if you already didn’t). The choice between the correct flags depends on what you’re configuring:

• for my development machine, I chose to build “just Mono” (the -r flag), and then added gnome-sharp and monodevelop afterwards (-m mono-addins gnome-sharp gnome-desktop-sharp monodevelop);
• for my VPS, I chose to build “just Mono”, without any additional modules.

Run the script with your selected parameters (don’t forget to specify the prefix!) and grab a cup of coffee as it could definitely take a while.

When finished, you should have a fully-functioning version of Mono in a directory of your own choice. Follow the instructions to enable and test your new installation, and buy Patrick a beer for his awesome work.

Setting up nginx and FastCGI

XSP provides a FastCGI server, which is an excellent way to make Mono and nginx talk. For this to work, you’ll need to know the exact location of the fastcgi-mono-serverX (where X is one of { “”, “2″, “4″ }, depending on the ASP.NET version you’d like to use). If you installed the Badgerports backport, it’s probably in your PATH; if you compiled from source, it’s in $PREFIX/bin/fastcgi-mono-serverX.

Now we need to point nginx to the FastCGI binary. Here’s a sample configuration file:

server {
  server_name {SERVER};
  access_log {ACCESSLOG};
  root {ROOT};

  # magick start!
  location / {
    index index.html index.htm default.aspx Default.aspx;
    # DEFAULTROUTE is the default route of your app; e.g. Home/Index
    fastcgi_index {DEFAULTROUTE};
    # choose a free port; e.g. 9001
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:{PORT};
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
  }

  # /Content contains just static files - we don't need
  # no FCGI to serve those!
  location /Content/ {
  }
}

You can easily deploy your ASP.NET application to {ROOT} by using MonoDevelop’s “Deploy to Web” functionality (Tools – Deploy to Web).

Now, edit /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params and add the following two lines defining certain environment variables the FastCGI server expects to find:

fastcgi_param PATH_INFO "";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

Finally, start the FastCGI server itself:

$PREFIX/bin/fastcgi-mono-server2 /applications={SERVER}:/:{ROOT} /socket=tcp:127.0.0.1:{PORT} &

Restart nginx and your application should be ready at the server_name of your choice. However, manually starting up FCGI isn’t too exciting. Fortunately, there’s an awesome script written by Tomas Bosak which automates that part – follow Tomas’ instructions to install the script, but make sure to update the path to the FastCGI binary if you compiled from source.

Another option would be to use nginx to proxy requests to a standalone XSP instance: it should be fairly straightforward, but I didn’t try it at all.

Mono <3 MySQL and Fluent NHibernate

Web applications usually work with some kind of a database. There are several ADO.NET providers working with Mono for different database servers like MySQL, PosgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. MySQL provides the Connector/Net library, which is a fully-managed ADO.NET provider. Setting it up is easy: download the library, unzip and add a reference to mysql.data.dll in MonoDevelop. Also note you’ll have to use the DLL from the “v2/” folder. There’s a quick & dirty tutorial on the Mono project website, and in-depth documentation on the MySQL website which should have enough information to get you up & running.

If you’d like to use Fluent NHibernate with Mono – good news! It works perfectly without any hacks: just download Fluent NHibernate and reference it in your project. Here’s a sample CreateSessionFactory() method for MySQL:

private static ISessionFactory CreateSessionFactory() {
  string connStr = "server=localhost;user={USER};database={DB};port={PORT};password={PWD}";
  return Fluently.Configure()
    .Database(
      MySQLConfiguration.Standard.ConnectionString()
    )
    .Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.AddFromAssembly(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()))
    .BuildSessionFactory();
}

Voilà.

ASP.NET MVC 3, WebMatrix, future…

Mono 2.10 should support ASP.NET MVC 3, although it’s not yet bundled with Mono as is the case with previous versions. There is also some preliminary support for WebMatrix in the form of WebMatrix.Data.dll and Razor. I didn’t have the time to play with any of these, so if you have some experience in setting it up, please share them in the comments.

I really like C# and ASP.NET MVC and I enjoy the idea of running .NET web applications on top of my preferred OS. This is something I’ll definitely be tinkering with in the future. For any questions, comments, advice or suggestions, feel free to use the comment form below, mention me on Twitter or contact me by e-mail on nikola@plejic.com.

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Svako rješenje ima svojih prednosti, no najjednostavnijim se i najefikasnijim u mojem slučaju pokazalo dodavanje sljedeće linije u ~/.vimrc:

au BufRead,BufNewFile /path/do/foldera/* setl noexpandtab

Gornji primjer će za sve fileove koji se nalaze unutar foldera /path/do/foldera (i ispod njega) koristiti “prave” tabove umjesto spaceova koji su moja defaultna konfiguracija. Hvala, Vim.

¹ (“Paralelni rad na nekoliko različitih projekata” ujedno i vrlo dobro opisuje razloge radi kojih je ovaj blog mrtav više od pola godine.)

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Kako sam počeo pratiti Haskell, naletio sam na jedan zanimljiv window manager napisan upravo u njemu – Xmonad. Xmonad je tzv. ’tiling’ window manager, što bi značilo da on sam raspoređuje prozore na vašem desktopu prema konfigurabilnim algoritmima i parametrima.

Tiling window manageri nisu ništa novo, no ovo je bio moj prvi susret s njima. Konceptualno mi je cijela stvar izgledala dosta interesantno, te sam ih odlučio i isprobati. Rezultat: krajnje oduševljenje i gotovo potpuna migracija na Xmonad za sve moje potrebe.

Instalacija na Ubuntuu je poprilično jednostavna: sudo apt-get install xmonad instalira najosnovnije potrebne pakete, a da bi povukli sve pakete koji su potrebni za konfiguraciju sličnu mojoj, instalirajte sljedeće: xmonad, libghc6-xmonad-contrib-dev, libghc6-xmonad-dev i dzen2.

Samo pokretanje se može izvršiti na više načina, a onaj kojeg ja koristim je jednostavni one-liner u .xsessionu (echo xmonad > .xsession) i odabir ‘Run Xclient script’ prilikom logiranja u GDM-u. Ostali načini su opisani u odličnoj dokumentaciji. Prije samog Xmonada, dodatno pokrenem i gnome-settings-daemon (treba dodati gnome-settings-daemon & na početak .xsession datoteke), da bi mi GTK aplikacije izgledale prema mojim GNOME postavkama (jer inače izgledaju ružno :)).

Prvi susret nije najugodniji – dočeka vas apsolutno prazan ekran, a miš ne odgovara ni na što drugo osim micanja po ekranu. Kombinacija ALT+Shift+Enter otvara terminal, a ukoliko ste instalirali dzen2, ALT+P će vam otvoriti dmenu, vrlo jednostavan i minimalističan launcher. Tipkanjem prvih par znakova imena aplikacije (npr. ‘fire’ za Firefox) i pritiskom na Enter nakon odabira pokrećete aplikaciju.

Kombinacijom ALT+1 do ALT+9 se prebacujete između devet virtualnih desktopa. Ukoliko otvorite više od jednog prozora na jednom virtualnom desktopu (npr. dva prozora Firefoxa), vidjet ćete stvarnu moć Xmonada–automatski dijeli prozore za maksimalnu iskoristivost desktopa. Između raznih tiling algoritama se prebacujete kombinacijom ALT+Space. Ostale kombinacije tipki za raznoraznu manipulaciju prozorima su opisane u kratkom i informativnom Xmonad tutorialu.

Samo prilagođavanje Xmonada se vrši preko datoteke ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs koja je obična Haskell source datoteka. Poznavanje Haskella za konfiguraciju nije potrebno, s obzirom da na službenim stranicama ima nekoliko primjera raznih konfiguracija koje nije teško prilagoditi vlastitim potrebama. Nakon editiranja xmonad.hs datoteke, dovoljno je pritisnuti ALT+q za reload konfiguracije bez resetiranja Xmonada.

S obzirom da Xmonad sam po sebi nema nikakvog status bara, nije moguće saznati na kojem ste  virtualnom desktopu i koji prozor gledate. Ovo posljednje je posebno neugodno, budući da po defaultu ne vidite tzv. ukrase za prozore (tj. title bar). U Xmonadu su uobičajena dva status bara: dzen2 (kojeg ste već vjerojatno instalirali radi dmenu launchera) i Xmobar. U trenutku konfiguracije, dzen2 mi je bio lagano prekompleksan za proučavanje, pa sam odabrao Xmobar koji mi služi sasvim dobro. U Ubuntu repozitorijima ga nema, pa ćete ga morati kompajlirati sami–potreban vam je Haskell kompajler (GHC je u repozitorijima) i Xmobar source kojeg, zajedno s uputama, možete naći na službenim stranicama.

Moja konfiguracija se nalazi ovdje–ono što je drugačije od defaultne je:

• Remapiranje ‘modifier’ tipke (po defaultu gore spominjani ALT) u Win tipku, da bi se izbjegli konflikti s drugim aplikacijama koje koriste slične shortcute.
• Firefox, Gnome-Terminal, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, Liferea (RSS reader) i Nautilus se otvaraju na za to predviđenim virtualnim desktopima, koji su adekvatno preimenovani za tu svrhu.
• Xmobar, vrlo jednostavan i konfigurabilan status bar, se pokreće zajedno s Xmonadom i uzima informacije o virtualnim desktopima, imenu trenutnog prozora i tiling algoritmu. Također, nevezano uz Xmonad, pokazuje trenutno zauzeće memorije, procesorskog vremena, stanje baterije i mreže te datum i vrijeme. Moja konfiguracijska datoteka se nalazi ovdje.
• Print screen tipka pokreće scrot, mali programčić za uzimanje screenshotova.
• Win+CTRL+X otvara Xmonadov launcher koji je vizualno ugodniji od dzenovog.

Ukoliko vam nedostaje panel i popis prozora koje trenutno imate otvorene, možete koristiti Gnome-Panel ili instalirati neki alternativni. Pokretanje panela je analogno pokretanju gnome-settings-daemona, opisanog gore.

Vrijedi napomenuti da Xmonad odlično radi u kombinaciji s Vimperatorom, pluginom koji Firefox pretvara u browser koji se ponaša i funkcionira kao i svima omiljeni editor Vim. Vimperator dodatno smanjuje potrebu za korištenjem miša, što ovisno o vašoj volji za navikavanjem, može ubrzati rad s browserom.

Xmonad, a i tiling window manageri općenito, definitivno nisu za svakoga–niti izgledaju pretjerano lijepo, niti imaju jednostavan learning curve–no Xmonad svoj posao radi odlično i nevjerojatno stabilno i brzo. Svakako isprobati.

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