These instructions will lead you through building CoreCLR and running a "Hello World" demo on OS X.
These instructions were validated on OS X Yosemite, although they probably work on earlier versions. The instructions makes use of both OS X and Windows machines, since parts of the .NET Core developer environment are not yet supported on OS X. Once those parts are supported on OS X, the Windows-specific instructions will be replaced.
If your machine has Command Line Tools for XCode 6.3 installed, you'll need to update them to the 6.3.1 version or higher in order to successfully build. There was an issue with the headers that shipped with version 6.3 that was subsequently fixed in 6.3.1.
Clone the CoreCLR repository (either upstream or a fork).
dotnet-mbp:git richlander$ git clone https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr
Cloning into 'coreclr'...
remote: Counting objects: 16526, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (21/21), done.
remote: Total 16526 (delta 8), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 16505
Receiving objects: 100% (16526/16526), 26.26 MiB | 9.87 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (7679/7679), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
This guide assumes that you've cloned the coreclr repository into ~/git/coreclr on your OS X machine and the corefx and coreclr repositories into C:\git\corefx and C:\git\coreclr on Windows. If your setup is different, you'll need to pay careful attention to the commands you run. In this guide, I'll always show you the current directory on both the OS X and Windows machine.
CoreCLR has a dependency on CMake for the build. You can download it from CMake downloads.
Alternatively, you can install CMake from Homebrew.
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ brew install cmake
Mono is needed in order to run NuGet.exe. NuGet will add .NET Core support at some point soon. You can download it from the Mono downloads page.
In order to keep everything tidy, create a new directory for all the files that you will build or acquire.
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ mkdir -p ~/coreclr-demo/runtime
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ mkdir -p ~/coreclr-demo/packages
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ cd ~/coreclr-demo/
NuGet is required to acquire any .NET assembly dependency that is not built by these instructions.
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ curl -L -O https://nuget.org/nuget.exe
To Build CoreCLR, run build.sh from the root of the coreclr repo.
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ cd ~/git/coreclr
dotnet-mbp:coreclr richlander$ ./build.sh
[Lots of stuff before this]
Repo successfully built.
Product binaries are available at /Users/richlander/git/coreclr/bin/Product/OSX.x64.Debug
Type ./build.sh -? to see the full set of build options.
Check the build output.
dotnet-mbp:coreclr richlander$ ls bin/Product/OSX.x64.Debug/
You will see several files. The interesting ones are:
corerun: The command line host. This program loads and starts the CoreCLR runtime and passes the managed program you want to run to it.libcoreclr.dylib: The CoreCLR runtime itself.
Copy the runtime and corerun into the demo directory.
dotnet-mbp:coreclr richlander$ cp bin/Product/OSX.x64.Debug/corerun ~/coreclr-demo/runtime/
dotnet-mbp:coreclr richlander$ cp bin/Product/OSX.x64.Debug/libcoreclr.dylib ~/coreclr-demo/runtime/
There isn't yet support for compiling managed code on OS X. The following instructions assume you are on a Windows machine with clones of both the CoreCLR and CoreFX repos and that has a correctly configured environment.
You will need to copy binaries built on Windows to your Mac. Use whatever copying method works for you, such as a thumbdrive, a sync program or a cloud drive. To make this easy, copy files to a demo directory on Windows, so that you can copy all of the files to your Mac together.
C:\git\coreclr>mkdir \coreclr-demo
Build mscorlib.dll out of the coreclr repository:
C:\git\coreclr>build.cmd osxmscorlib
The output is placed in bin\obj\Unix.x64.Debug. Copy to the demo folder.
C:\git\coreclr>copy bin\obj\Unix.x64.Debug\mscorlib.dll \coreclr-demo
Build the rest of the Framework out of the corefx directory. You need to pass some special parameters to build.cmd.
C:\git\corefx>build.cmd /p:OSGroup=OSX /p:SkipTests=true
It's also possible to add /t:rebuild to build.cmd to force it to delete the previously built assemblies.
For the purposes of this demo, you need to copy a few required assemblies to the demo folder.
C:\git\corefx>copy bin\OSX.AnyCPU.Debug\System.Console\System.Console.dll \coreclr-demo
C:\git\corefx>copy bin\OSX.AnyCPU.Debug\System.Diagnostics.Debug\System.Diagnostics.Debug.dll \coreclr-demo
Copy all of the newly built assemblies from C:\coreclr-demo to your Mac, in the ~/coreclr-demo/runtime/ directory. The runtime directory should now look like the following:
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ ls ~/coreclr-demo/runtime/
System.Console.dll libcoreclr.dylib
System.Diagnostics.Debug.dll mscorlib.dll
corerun
The rest of the assemblies you need to run are presently just facades that point to mscorlib. We can pull these dependencies down via NuGet (which currently requires Mono).
Make a packages/packages.config file with the following text. These are the required dependencies of this particular app. Different apps will have different dependencies and require a different packages.config - see Issue #480.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
<package id="System.Console" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Contracts" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Debug" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Diagnostics.Tools" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Globalization" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.IO" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.IO.FileSystem.Primitives" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Reflection" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Resources.ResourceManager" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Runtime" version="4.0.20-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Runtime.Extensions" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Runtime.Handles" version="4.0.0-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Runtime.InteropServices" version="4.0.20-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Text.Encoding" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Text.Encoding.Extensions" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Threading" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
<package id="System.Threading.Tasks" version="4.0.10-beta-22703" />
</packages>
And restore your packages.config file:
dotnet-mbp:~ richlander$ cd ~/coreclr-demo
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ mono nuget.exe restore packages/packages.config -Source https://www.myget.org/F/dotnet-corefx/ -PackagesDirectory packages
Finally, you need to copy the assemblies over to the runtime folder. You don't want to copy over System.Console.dll or System.Diagnostics.Debug however, since the version from NuGet is the Windows version. The easiest way to do this is with a little find magic:
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ find . -wholename '*/aspnetcore50/*.dll' -exec cp -n {} ~/coreclr-demo/runtime \;
Now you need a Hello World application to run. You can write your own, if you'd like. Here's a very simple one:
using System;
public class Program
{
public static void Main (string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, OS X");
Console.WriteLine("Love from CoreCLR.");
}
}
Personally, I'm partial to the one on corefxlab which will print a picture for you.
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/corefxlab/master/demos/CoreClrConsoleApplications/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.cs
Then you just need to build it, with mcs, the Mono C# compiler. FYI: The Roslyn C# compiler will soon be available on OS X. Because you need to compile the app against the .NET Core surface area, you need to pass references to the contract assemblies you restored using NuGet:
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ mcs /nostdlib /noconfig /r:packages/System.Console.4.0.0-beta-22703/lib/contract/System.Console.dll /r:packages/System.Runtime.4.0.20-beta-22703/lib/contract/System.Runtime.dll -out:runtime/HelloWorld.exe HelloWorld.cs
You're ready to run Hello World! To do that, run corerun, passing the path to the managed exe, plus any arguments. The HelloWorld from corefxlab will print a special fruit if you pass "mac" as an argument, so:
dotnet-mbp:coreclr-demo richlander$ cd runtime/
dotnet-mbp:runtime richlander$ ./corerun HelloWorld.exe mac
Over time, this process will get easier. We will remove the dependency on having to compile managed code on Windows. For example, we are working to get our NuGet packages to include Windows, Linux and OS X versions of an assembly, so you can simply nuget restore the dependencies.
Pull Requests to enable building CoreFX and mscorlib on OS X via Mono would be very welcome. A sample that builds Hello World on OS X using the correct references but via XBuild or MonoDevelop would also be great! Some of our processes (e.g. the mscorlib build) rely on Windows specific tools, but we want to figure out how to solve these problems for OS X as well. There's still a lot of work ahead, so if you're interested in helping, we're ready for you!