Getting Started with dotnet core on a Mac

Shameless plug - I am co-presenting a workshop with my colleague Beau Palmquist at dotnet Fringe this Sunday July 10, 2016. Our workshop is on Building Smart Microservice Clients with React, Redux, and React-Router.

In preparation, I was setting up my Macbook and realized there were no real good instructions on how to get set up with .NET Core on a Mac. Maybe this is because it is so new or maybe because it is so ridiculously easy. Steps 1 and 2 are optional to get the helloworld app up and running. We don’t actually need to write any code. These steps are for after when you want to get fancier.

Step 1: Install Your Favorite IDE

This does come with a slight caveat. We need to make use of the OmniSharp to enable a palatable coding experience in your editor so this does limit our choices slightly. But it does support most of the popular choices like Atom, Sublime and Brackets.

Step 2: Install OmniSharp

Head over to OmniSharp to get install instructions for your IDE.

Step 3: Install .NET Core

To install .NET Core we need to install the latest version of OpenSSL. The easiest way to do this is with Homebrew with the following commands:

~$ brew update 

The update command ensures your are running the latest Homebrew with the latest formulae.

~$ brew install openssl 

The install command does exactly what you would think. It installs the OpenSSL package.

~$ brew link --force openssl 

The link --force command Symlinks all the keg-only formulae into the Homebrew prefix.

Now we can just grab the .NET Core official installer and we are ready to write some code.

Step 4: Write Code (Sort of)

To get up and running with the basic ‘Hello World’ app we just need to run a few more commands:

~$ mkdir helloworld 
~$ cd helloworld 
~$ dotnet new 
~$ dotnet restore 
~$ dotnet run 

After running this series of commands we should see something like this

And done!