Raspberry PI Zero (and Zero W) is a cool and cheap piece of technology that can run software anywhere. Being a primarily .NET developer, I wanted to give it a try running the current version of ASP.NET Core, which is as of now 2.2.
However, the first problem is that even though .NET Core supports ARM CPUs, it does not support ARM32v6, only v7 and above. After digging a bit, I found out that mono does support that CPU and on top of that, it’s binary compatible with .NET Framework 4.7.
In this post, I’ll summarise several hours of trial and error to get it working. If developing on Windows, targeting both netcoreapp2.2 and net472 is easier since chances are we’ll have all installed already. On Linux, however, it’s not that easy and it’s when Mono comes in to help, we need the reference assemblies to build the net472 version
Let’s check the tools we’ll use:
$ dotnet --version 2.2.202
$ docker --version Docker version 18.09.0, build 4d60db4
Create a new dotnet core MVC web application to get the starting template.
$ dotnet new mvc -o dotnet.mvc
Update the target framework to TargetFrameworks if we want to actually target both. We could target only net472 if desired. Also, since Microsoft.AspNetCore.App and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Razor.Design metapackages won’t be available on .NET Framework, instead reference directly the Nuget packages we’ll use, here is an example of the ones the default template uses.
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web">
<PropertyGroup>
<TargetFrameworks>net472;netcoreapp2.2</TargetFrameworks>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting.WindowsServices" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.HttpsPolicy" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.CookiePolicy" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.EventLog" Version="2.2.0" />
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Options" Version="2.2.0" />
</ItemGroup>
</Project>
When targeting net472, we need to use mono’s reference assemblies since they’re not part of dotnet core, to do that, we set the environment variable FrameworkPathOverride to the appropriated path, typically something like /usr/lib/mono/4.7.2-api/.
export FrameworkPathOverride=/usr/lib/mono/4.7.2-api/
Then proceed as usual with dotnet cli
- dotnet restore
- dotnet build
- dotnet run
To make a more consistent build across platforms. We’ll create a Dockerfile, this will also enable us to build locally without having to install mono on our local development environments. This is a multi-stage docker file that builds the application and creates the runtime image.
More information on how to create the docker file for dotnet core applications. https://docs.docker.com/engine/examples/dotnetcore/
FROM pomma89/dotnet-mono:dotnet-2-mono-5-sdk AS build-env WORKDIR /app ENV FrameworkPathOverride /usr/lib/mono/4.7.2-api/ # Copy csproj and restore as distinct layers COPY *.csproj ./ RUN dotnet restore # Copy everything else and build COPY . ./ RUN dotnet publish -c Release -o out -f net472 # Build runtime image for ARM v5 using mono FROM arm32v5/mono:5.20 WORKDIR /app COPY --from=build-env /app/out . EXPOSE 5000 ENV ASPNETCORE_URLS http://*:5000 ENTRYPOINT [ "mono", "dotnet.mvc.exe" ]
Since we are building with mono, the resulting executable is in this case dotnet.mvc.exe file. The environment variable ASPNETCORE_URLS is required in order to be able to listen on any network interface, by default it will only listen on localhost which is in fact, the container itself and not our host. Combined with EXPOSE 5000 it’s possible to access the application from outside the container.
The secret ingredient to make it work on a raspberry pi zero (ARM32v6) is the line “FROM arm32v5/mono:5.20” which takes a base docker image using a compatible CPU architecture.
To run this application locally we use the traditional dotnet run but since we’ve specified two target frameworks, the parameter -f is required to specify which one we want to use. In this case, chances are we’re using netcoreapp2.2 locally and net472 to build and run on the raspberry pi.
$ dotnet run -f netcoreapp2.2
Once we’re happy the application works as expected locally, we could build the docker image locally to test the whole docker building process is working before deploying to the device. To test this way, we have to modify the second FROM line and remove the “arm32v5/” from the image name, taking the PC version of mono instead.
The following sequence shows the docker commands.
Build the image locally
$ docker build -t test .
Either run in interactive mode -i -t or run in detached mode -d
$ docker run --rm -it -p 3000:5000 test $ docker run --rm -d -p 3000:5000 test
Once it’s running, we can just browse to http://localhost:3000/ and verify it’s up and running.
Now we can go back and modify the second FROM line by putting “arm32v5/” where it was.
# build the image and tag it to my docker hub registry $ docker build -t abelperezok/mono-mvc:arm32v5-test .
# don’t forget to log in to docker hub $ docker login
# push this image to docker hub registry $ docker push abelperezok/mono-mvc:arm32v5-test
Once it’s uploaded to the registry, we can connect to the raspberry pi and run the follow docker run command.
# pull and run the container from this image $ docker run --rm -d -p 3000:5000 abelperezok/mono-mvc:arm32v5-test
Helpful links
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/running-asp-net-core-2-0-via-mono/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44770702/build-nuget-package-on-linux-that-targets-net-framework
https://www.mono-project.com/download/stable/#download-lin-debian
https://andrewlock.net/building-net-framework-asp-net-core-apps-on-linux-using-mono-and-the-net-cli/
