How To Install Mono on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mono on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Mono is an open-source platform for developing and running cross-platform applications based on the ECMA/ISO Standards. It is a free and open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Mono on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Mono on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install dirmngr gnupg apt-transport-https ca-certificates

Step 2. Installing Mono on Debian 10.

First, we import the repository’s GPG key:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF

Next, add the Mono repository to your system sources’ list:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian stable-buster main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list'

Then, update the packages list and install Mono:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mono-complete

To verify if Mono is installed, run the commands below:

$ mono --version

Mono JIT compiler version 6.8.1.107 (tarball Tue Mar  8 14:16:12 UTC 2020)
Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Novell, Inc, Xamarin Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
    TLS:           __thread
    SIGSEGV:       altstack
    Notifications: epoll
    Architecture:  amd64
    Disabled:      none
    Misc:          softdebug 
    Interpreter:   yes
    LLVM:          yes(610)
    Suspend:       hybrid
    GC:            sgen (concurrent by default)

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Mono. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Mono on your Debian 10 Buster system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Mono website.