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Setup DNX in macOS

Dec 17, 2015 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon archive

After so much waiting, so many “I’ll do this first”, so much app coding etc. etc. (yep, I blame my family as well), I finally managed to start playing around with DNX and ASP.NET 5.

For those of you who don’t know it, .NET 5 will add platform agnostic capabilities to .NET. With it, you can create web apps, api:s and console apps on Windows, OS X and Linux and run them everywhere.

Before I begin, I’ll just mention some terms that I’ll use in this post.

  • dnx stands for .NET Execution Environment. It’s a console application that you get access to when installing ASP.NET 5. You use it to create web sites, run your apps etc.

  • dnvm stands for .NET Version Manager. It is used to install new versions of .NET Core and the various tools it needs

  • dnu stands for DNX Utility. It’s a console application that you can use to install dependencies for your projects, like npm.

Step 1 - Install Mono

To setup DNX, first install Mono. You can install it from the download page or by using Homebrew, which is a great package manager for macOS.

Step 2 - Install Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an open source IDE (well, not quite yet), that can be used for all kinds of projects. It was built with plugins in mind, so expect an explosion in the upcoming months.

You don’t have to use Visual Studio Code to write ASP.NET 5 code. You can use any other editor, like Sublime or Atom. However, I think you should have a look at Visual Studio Code. It’s a pretty nice editor.

Visual Studio Code can be downloaded here or installed with Homebrew Cask, which is a great package manager for OS X applications.

If you are used to the full Visual Studio experience, you’ll notice that Visual Studio Code is stripped. You can’t even create new projects or solutions with it. To create new projects, you must use ASP.NET 5.

Step 3 - Install ASP.NET 5

To install ASP.NET 5, download this file. After installing it, you must set it up. Now, brace yourself - you will have to do the rest in the Terminal, which for some is a most welcome change.

Open the Terminal, then type dnx. You’ll notice that the command is not recognized yet. To register it, run the following command:

source /Users/<your user name>/.dnx/dnvm/dnvm.sh

This will make it possible to run dnx and dnu from any folder. If you now run the dnx command again, it will be recognized.

Step 4 - (Optional) Install Yeoman

If you want to develop ASP.NET 5, you now have all the tools you need (and an optional Visual Studio Code as well). However, to simplify things even more, you can use Yeoman to generate projects. With Yeoman, you don’t have to setup each new project from scratch.

To install Yeoman and the ASP.NET project generator plugin, run these commands in the terminal:

npm install -g yo
npm install -g generator-aspnet

After this, you can create ASP.NET projects with Yeoman, using this command from any folder:

yo aspnet

This will open a wizard that lets you choose a project template, after which Yeoman will setup the project for you in a sub folder with the same name as your project.

Step 5 - Run your project

This post will not cover the project structure of ASP.NET 5 projects. However, to sum it up, the following is true for your generated project:

  • there are no solution files
  • project files are now small
  • the json files and project files have no references to the files in the project
  • it’s a beautiful thing

Once you have a project, cd into the project folder, then run dnu restore to restore all dependencies (like npm install). Once all dependencies are restored, you can run your project.

Depending on what kind of project you have, you run it in different ways:

  • Console app - dnx run
  • Web app - dnx web
  • Web API - dnx web
  • Test project - dnx test

Although you can run dnx build to build your project prior to running it, there is no need for this, since the run commands builds the project as well.

That’s it!

That’s about it. You should now be able to create and run new projects in ASP.NET 5 In a future post, we’ll look at how to setup a code project with a test project.

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