Building Nancy on Mono

Setting up the development environment

We have been using Mono 2.10.2, anything earlier produces build errors. The version of MonoDevelop that we have been using is the 2.6 build. The instructions are the same for both Linux and OS X installations.

Third-party dependencies

NDjango is built using F#, so in order to compile and execute the NDjango engine you will need to have F# and the FSharp PowerPack installed. If you are running Mono on Linux, you will have to also install the fsharp package, but if you are running on OSX no extra step is needed because F# is bundled in the Mono 2.10.2 installation package for OSX.

Once downloaded you need to unzip and install it into the GAC

sudo unzip FSharpPowerPack.zip -d /opt
cd /opt/FSharpPowerPack-2.0.0.0/bin
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.Compiler.CodeDom.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.Build.Tasks.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.Compatibility.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.Linq.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.Metadata.dll
sudo gacutil /i FSharp.PowerPack.Parallel.Seq.dll

To verify that the installation was successful run the following commands

$ fsi

Microsoft (R) F# 2.0 Interactive build (private)
Copyright (c) 2002-2010 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

For help type #help;;

> #r "FSharp.PowerPack.dll";;

--> Referenced '/opt/FSharpPowerPack-2.0.0.0/bin/FSharp.PowerPack.dll'

> #quit;;

Build configurations

The Nancy.sln file contains two, Mono specific, build configurations, called MonoDebug and MonoRelease, that should be build when building Nancy on Mono. These ensures that windows-only features (such as the WCF host) will not produce build errors when you compile the source.

Debugging xUnit Tests Using MonoDevelop

If you ever find yourself in a position where you need to debug one of the xUnit tests in Nancy on Mono you should read Debugging xUnit Tests Using MonoDevelop by our very own Steven Robbins.