Hosting Nancy with Nginx on Ubuntu

This tutorial describes how to install and run a NancyFx powered website on Ubuntu 12.04

Install mono on your ubuntu machine

The version of Mono that comes on Ubuntu is outdated, and not suitable for our purposes as of 2015-04-08. Instead, you have two options.

1. Follow these directions to install an updated Mono from the Mono project's own repositories, or you can build it yourself.

2. Compile it yourself (for advanced users familiar with Linux)

To compile it yourself, go to the mono download page to retrieve the the latest mono version. In our case, we build the latest source from github:

$ sudo apt-get install git autoconf automake libtool g++ gettext
$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ git clone git://github.com/mono/mono.git
$ cd mono
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
$ make get-monolite-latest
$ make
$ sudo make install

Now we are ready to run .NET applications under linux.

Create nancy website

Open Visual Studio 2013 (other versions may work, but this tutorial was written using 2013). If you do not already have the Nancy solution templates for Visual Studio, get and install them. Open Visual Studio and create a new solution. The Nancy templates will be listed along with ASP.NET Web Applicaiton under Templates -> Visual C# -> Web. Choose Nancy Application with self-hosting.

Edit the program.cs file and add the following code:

namespace NancyDemo
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var uri = "http://localhost:8888";
            Console.WriteLine(uri);
            // initialize an instance of NancyHost (found in the Nancy.Hosting.Self package)
            var host = new NancyHost(new Uri(uri));
            host.Start();  // start hosting

            //Under mono if you daemonize a process a Console.ReadLine will cause an EOF 
            //so we need to block another way
            if (args.Any(s => s.Equals("-d", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)))
            {
                Thread.Sleep(Timeout.Infinite);
            }
            else
            {
                Console.ReadKey();
            }

            host.Stop();  // stop hosting
        }
    }
}

Create a new folder Modules and add the class HelloModule.cs

namespace NancyDemo
{
    public class HelloModule : NancyModule
    {
        public HelloModule()
        {
            Get["/"] = parameters => "Hello World!";
        }
    }
}

Make sure it works locally first! Go ahead and start the debugger. You should be able to go to http://localhost:8888 in your web browser and see the "Hello World!" message.

Install nginx

nginx is the webserver we're using. We configure it to forward all requests to the nancy self hosted application. The content folder with static files will be handled by nginx.

$ sudo apt-get install nginx

Create the website configuration file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/nancydemo with the following content. The server_name is the domain on which the request will be handled. Change this to your own value.

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  yourdomainname.com;
    root /var/www/nancydemo;

    location /Content/ {
        alias /var/www/nancydemo/Content/;
        location ~*  \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js|ttf)$ {
            expires 365d;
        }
    }

    location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8888;
    }
}

When testing, instead of yourdomainname.com, you can substitute the local IP address, eg 192.168.1.200.

To enable the website, create a symbolic link from the sites-available to the sites-enabled folder. This will make it easy to temporary disable sites in the future.

$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/nancydemo /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/nancydemo

The configuration is completed, reload Nginx to apply.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

Install supervisor

To make sure our nancy self hosted website never stops, we use supervisor. This program makes sure that NancyDemo keeps running.

$ apt-get install supervisor

Configure supervisor by creating a new file /etc/supervisor/conf.d/nancydemo.conf

[program:nancydemo]
command=mono NancyDemo.exe -d
user=www-data
stderr_logfile = /var/log/supervisor/nancydemo-err.log
stdout_logfile = /var/log/supervisor/nancydemo-stdout.log
directory=/var/www/nancydemo/

^{NOTE If you compiled Mono yourself in the first step, change the second line to command=/user/bin/mono NancyDemo.exe -d}

Start the control manager of supervisor

$ sudo supervisorctl

And update the configuration. You should see that there is a new process added. Now start nancydemo.

$ supervisor>update
$ supervisor>start nancydemo

Put your hands in the air

Go to http://yourdomain.com and see our baby saying "Hello World".

Notes

Linux is very critical about uppercase and lowercase letters, so if a view can't be found, make sure you've used the exact name with the exact uppercase and lowercase letters.