How does running ASP.Net on Linux compare to the standard Microsoft-centric solution?

Question

I know its possible to develop and host an ASP.Net site on Linux using Mono and Apache, but I\'d like to know how well it works and if its worth the hassle? I prefer open sourc

Answer 1

Please note that although you can deploy ASP on Linux via things like Mono, if you use a Microsoft ide such as Visual studio, webmatrix, or Visual web developer your licence only allows you to deploy these on Microsoft servers!

Answer 2

I switched from MS-centric solutions about a year and a half ago and now I'm hosting all of my websites and web projects on Linux/Mono/Apache/MySQL based virtual servers (I was originally using nginx instead of apache, but mono-fastcgi-server was randomly causing thrashing, so I choose apache as a web server). I can summarize my (subjective) experience with this configuration into a few points:

• It can take some time to get used to difference between Linux and MS based environments (if you never used Linux before), but I do not regret this decision. What helped me a lot was creating installation and configuration procedures for particular technologies (for example mono parallel environments, apache virtual hosts configurations, dealing with certain issues) which are mostly repeatable and can be automated.

• You can still use Visual Studio to develop your applications and then deploy them on Linux machine. If you are using this approach it's a good habit to test your apps regularly on mono for possible incompatibilities.

• I deploy web applications via FTP which is probably the easiest way of doing it (well maybe WinSCP is even easier, because you don't have to set up FTP server, but it depends on your preferences).

• So far I have run into 2 cases with Mono/Apache where memory leak caused unavailability of the website. This was probably caused by Boehm garbage collector which I was using on old mono installation. I haven't had similar problems with a new sgen GC on recent versions of mono.

• What I like the most on mono running on Linux environment compared to MS stuff is that you don't have to click around all the time when doing administrative tasks. Shell is for me unified administrative interface which can speed up things (if you have some practice).

Answer 3

Hosting ASP.NET on mono from my experience is quite easy and fast. i has been host multiple of my project using Mono ASP.NET MVC 1 / 2 using MySQL and PostgreSQL, serve by Apache mod_mono.

Compared with deployment on Windows Server. It quite narrow when using modern linux distribution which already provides all package to deploy mono ASP.NET. the only drawback is you have to make sure your Web Application portable enough in term of IO accessing and only very short learning curve and experience needed to debug and publish your project.

For Deploying our project in Linux. It easy using Version Control (VS) such as Mercurial or Git if u have fully control on the server. If U have more experience using continues integration is more better. I mainly using mercurial so step bellow is the step i usually do, but i think it almost similar for Git:

• Install mercurial, and configure mod_wsgi, hgweb.wsgi and hgwerb.config
• Init VS repo and publish at hgweb.config and configure hook to update and invoke xbuild to automatically build when u push it
• publish the repo (web part) as mono application at mod_mono.conf
• So u just need to code at visual studio, commit and push your changes using tortoiseHg without event login to server (set repo url, user and password at your repo hgrc)