How To Install Mono on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mono on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community is helping position Mono to become the leading choice for the development of cross-platform applications.

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 Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are 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 software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing Mono on Ubuntu 20.04.

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 apt-add-repository 'deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu stable-bionic main'

Then, update the packages list and install Mono:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mono-complete

If you’re going to be building a .NET project, the easiest way to do it is using MonoDevelop IDE. To install MonoDevelop, run the commands below:

sudo apt install monodevelop

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

$ mono --version

Mono JIT compiler version 6.9.0.146 (tarball Tue May 20 15:12:59 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 Spotify on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Mono website.