Configure apache2 + mod_mono to run ASP.Net MVC5 application on Ubuntu 14.04

4 min readMar 3, 2016

Install binaries

Install mono

Please click here to install mono.

Install mod_mono

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mono-complete
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-mono mono-apache-server4

After above installation, visit http://your-host-name, we should see below default page.

Verify mod_mono.config

cat /etc/apache2/mods-available/mod_mono.confAddType application/x-asp-net .aspx .ashx .asmx .ascx .asax .config .ascx
DirectoryIndex index.aspx# Include the web application definitions generated by mono-server{2,4}-update.
#
# If you want to use ASP.NET 2.0 (via mono-apache-server2), use:
# Include /etc/mono-server2/mono-server2-hosts.conf
#
# If you want to use ASP.NET 4.0 (via mono-apache-server4), use:
# Include /etc/mono-server4/mono-server4-hosts.confInclude /etc/mono-server4/mono-server4-hosts.conf

Prepare you webapp directory

Create folder for your webapp

mkdir /home/azureuser/webapp

Grant permission allow Apache to access your webapp folder

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/azureuser/webapp

Config Apache for your webapp

Generate Apache config

Go to http://go-mono.com/config-mod-mono, in this article i will choose “Virtual Host” in “Configuration Type”, but it will be similar if you choose “Application”

Fill in require fields and click preview to generate configuration file, and modify “/usr/bin/mod-mono-server2” to “/usr/bin/mod-mono-server4”.

if you webapp require certain environment variable, you can define with “MonoSetEnv” command within the config file.

Virtual Host:

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 ServerName kudutry.scm.cloudapp.net
 MonoAutoApplication disabled
 AddHandler mono .aspx ascx .asax .ashx .config .cs .asmx .axd
 MonoApplications “/:/home/azureuser/webapp”
 MonoServerPath kudutry.scm.cloudapp.net /usr/bin/mod-mono-server4DocumentRoot /home/azureuser/webapp
 <Directory />
 Options FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 </Directory>
 <Directory “/home/azureuser/webapp”>
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
 AllowOverride AuthConfig FileInfo
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 SetHandler mono
 DirectoryIndex index.aspx index.html Default.cshtml
 </Directory>ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
 <Directory “/usr/lib/cgi-bin”>
 AllowOverride None
 Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 </Directory>ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/kudu-error.log# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
 # alert, emerg.
 LogLevel warnCustomLog /var/log/apache2/kudu-access.log combined</VirtualHost>

Application:

Alias /scm “/home/azureuser/webapp”
 # MonoServerPath can be changed to specify which version of ASP.NET is hosted
 # mod-mono-server1 = ASP.NET 1.1 / mod-mono-server2 = ASP.NET 2.0
 # For SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, uncomment the line below:
 # MonoServerPath scm “/opt/novell/mono/bin/mod-mono-server2”
 # For Mono on openSUSE, uncomment the line below instead:
 MonoServerPath scm “/usr/bin/mod-mono-server4”# To obtain line numbers in stack traces you need to do two things: 
 # 1) Enable Debug code generation in your page by using the Debug=”true” 
 # page directive, or by setting <compilation debug=”true” /> in the 
 # application’s Web.config
 # 2) Uncomment the MonoDebug true directive below to enable mod_mono debugging
 MonoDebug scm true
 
 # The MONO_IOMAP environment variable can be configured to provide platform abstraction
 # for file access in Linux. Valid values for MONO_IOMAP are:
 # case
 # drive
 # all
 # Uncomment the line below to alter file access behavior for the configured application
 MonoSetEnv scm MONO_IOMAP=all
 #
 # Additional environtment variables can be set for this server instance using 
 # the MonoSetEnv directive. MonoSetEnv takes a string of ‘name=value’ pairs 
 # separated by semicolons. For instance, to enable platform abstraction *and* 
 # use Mono’s old regular expression interpreter (which is slower, but has a
 # shorter setup time), uncomment the line below instead:
 # MonoSetEnv scm MONO_IOMAP=all;MONO_OLD_RX=1MonoApplications scm “/scm:/home/azureuser/webapp”
 <Location “/scm”>
 Allow from all
 Order allow,deny
 MonoSetServerAlias scm
 SetHandler mono
 SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
 SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI “\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$” no-gzip dont-vary
 </Location>
 <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript
 </IfModule>

Register config

Navigate to /etc/apache2/sites-available, copy above content and save into webapp.conf (file name doesn`t matter, but must have suffix “conf”). And register config with a2ensite, we should see below output.

sudo a2ensite webapp.confEnabling site webapp.
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
 service apache2 reload

A symlink will be created under /etc/apache2/sites-enabled

├── sites-available
│ ├── 000-default.conf
│ ├── default-ssl.conf
│ └── webapp.conf
└── sites-enabled
 ├── 000-default.conf -> ../sites-available/000-default.conf
 └── webapp.conf -> ../sites-available/webapp.conf

Enable mod_mono module

Enable mod_mono module, navigate to /etc/apache2/mods-available

sudo a2enmod mod_mono

should see below output

Enabling module mod_mono.
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
 service apache2 restart

let restart Apache (which will also reload all the config)

sudo service apache2 restart

Now visit http://your-hostname/scm, (http://your-hostname if you are configuring virtual host). Ooop! 403!!!

We can also see error logs from /var/log/apache2/error.log

[Thu Mar 03 01:16:13.498564 2016] [authz_core:error] [pid 21259:tid 139811025307392] [client 50.35.67.72:51532] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /home/azureuser/webapp

Allow request to visit webapp folder

Turn out by default Apache not allow request access any file path other than /var/www/html. Let edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

We will see there is an sample code block that commented out in default

#<Directory /srv/>
# Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
# AllowOverride None
# Require all granted
#</Directory>

Enable or copy it and update the folder path

<Directory /home/azureuser/webapp>
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Require all granted
</Directory>

Restart Apache again then you should good to go!

sudo service apache2 restart