Setting up nginx, Mono and ASP.NET on the RaspberryPi

UPDATE: Much of this post is no longer valid with the new Raspbian image. For example the steps in the Initial Setup section are now automated in the initial setup screen. Also wheezy ships with a newer version of mono, so depending on your needs, there may no longer be a need to download and compile the latest source.

Thanks to the all the sources on the interwebs for help compiling these steps. These instructions assume you’re running Debian image on your pi. If you havent set that up see here for further instructions.

Initial Setup

Once you have written the image to your sd card and inserted it, plugin the pi to a display, keyboard, ethernet and usb power. Login using the default creds pi/raspberry.

First we need to resize the root partition to fill the SD card as the default size of 1.6Gb is not big enough (You’ll need ~2.5Gb total, some of which you can delete after the install).

sudo fdisk -uc /dev/mmcblk0

Type p<enter> for a list of partitions and note the start of the Linux partition (i.e. 157696).
Delete the Linux and Linux swap... partitions by pressing d<enter> and the partition number #<enter>, in this case 2 and 3.
Create a new partition by pressing n<enter> of type primary, p<enter>. This will be partition 2, 2<enter> starting at the location of the Linux partition you noted earlier 1234<enter>. When prompted for the last sector press <enter> to accept the default which is the remaining space on the SD card.
Type w<enter> to save.

Now reboot, resize the partition and reboot once more and verify the new size:

sudo reboot
sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
sudo reboot
df -h

The following commands set the time zone, password and enable ssh:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

passwd

sudo mv /boot/boot_enable_ssh.rc /boot/boot.rc

You’ll want to either setup a static DHCP lease on your DHCP server or configure a static ip on the pi. The following command displays the network interface (and the mac address) if you want to setup a static DHCP lease:

ifconfig -a

Or the following command allows you to set a static ip:

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Change this:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

To this (with your settings):

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.100
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.254

Now restart:

sudo reboot

You can now unplug your display and keyboard and ssh into the pi. You may want to setup a hosts record on your machine so you don’t have to remember the ip address.

Installing nginx

To install nginx you’ll need to to first update apt-get. Next install the nginx package, make the web root dir and add the group account:

apt-get update
apt-get install nginx
sudo mkdir /var/www
sudo groupadd www-data

Edit the default site configuration:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Next disable ipv6 (By commenting out the line), also set the site domain name:

...
server {
    ...
    #listen   [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
    
    server_name www.mysite.com;
    ...
}
...

Start the web server:

sudo service nginx start

Create a test page:

sudo vi /var/www/index.html

If all is well you should see your test page.

Installing mono

Unfortunately the latest version of mono isn’t available for squeeze, which at the time of writing is the latest stable version of debian. The official squeeze mono package is version 2.6.7 which is equivilent to .NET 3.5. Subsequent debian versions (i.e. wheezy and sid) will ship with an oficial mono package of version 2.10.8.1 which is equivilent to .NET 4.0. So if the pi image you installed is wheezy or higher or you don’t mind running the older version of mono you can just use sudo apt-get install mono-complete. Otherwise if you’re on squeeze and want to run the latest version of mono we’ll have to grab the source and compile it (Which will take ~8 hours) or download the precompiled version.

First install the prerequsites:

apt-get install gcc libtool bison pkg-config libglib2.0-dev gettext make bzip2 g++ autoconf automake

a) Either download the precompiled version:

wget https://github.com/downloads/mikeobrien/pidev/mono-2.10.8-compiled-pi.tar.bz2
tar xvjf mono-2.10.8-pi-compiled.tar.bz2; cd mono-2.10.8
make install
cd ..; rm -rf mono-2.10.8; rm mono-2.10.8-pi-compiled.tar.bz2

b) Or compile it yourself:

wget http://origin-download.mono-project.com/sources/mono/mono-2.10.8.tar.bz2
tar xvjf mono-2.10.8.tar.bz2; cd mono-2.10.8
./configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; make install
cd ..; rm -rf mono-2.10.8; rm mono-2.10.8.tar.bz2

Then verify the installation:

mono --version

Configuring ASP.NET

First you will need to install the mono FastCGI server. As mentioned earlier, the official debian squeeze package is a bit old. If your ok with this or if you are running debian wheezy or higher you can just do sudo apt-get install mono-fastcgi-server2. Otherwise you will have to build and install from scratch as follows:

wget http://origin-download.mono-project.com/sources/xsp/xsp-2.10.2.tar.bz2
tar xvjf xsp-2.10.2.tar.bz2; cd xsp-2.10.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; make install
cd ..; rm -rf xsp-2.10.2; rm xsp-2.10.2.tar.bz2

Then we need to setup FastCGI in the default nginx website:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

By adding the highlighted configuration:

...
server {
    ...
    location / {
        root   /var/www;
        index  index.html index.htm index.aspx;
        fastcgi_index index.aspx;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    }
    ...
}
...

Next we need modify the FastCGI config file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params

By adding these lines to the end of the file:

# ASP.NET
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO           "";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME     $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

Now we will need to download the mono FastCGI startup script (Complements of Tomas Bosak) and install it:

wget -P /etc/init.d/ https://github.com/downloads/mikeobrien/pidev/monoserve
chmod +x /etc/init.d/monoserve
update-rc.d monoserve defaults

Edit the FastCGI startup script:

sudo vi /etc/init.d/monoserve

And set the domain name you set in the nginx site configuration (Highlighted below):

...
WEBAPPS="www.mysite.com:/:/var/www/"
...

Note: The FastCGI startup script is set to use fastcgi-mono-server4. This would need to be adjusted if you are using older or future versions of mono.

Delete the static file you created earier and create an asp.net file:

rm /var/www/index.html
sudo vi /var/www/index.aspx

With some dynamic content:

Hello, the time is <%= System.DateTime.Now %>.

Start the service and make sure the page works:

sudo service monoserve start

Next steps

In my next installment we’ll get FubuMVC running on the pi.