Avalonia/docs/guidelines/build.md

Building Avalonia

Windows

Avalonia requires at least Visual Studio 2015 to build on Windows.

Install GTK Sharp

For the moment under windows, you must have gtk-sharp installed. Note that after installing the package your machine may require a restart before GTK# is added to your path. We hope to remove or make this dependency optional at some point in the future.

Clone the Avalonia repository

git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
git submodule update --init

Open in Visual Studio

Open the Avalonia.sln solution in Visual Studio 2015 or newer. The free Visual Studio Community edition works fine.

Linux

Install the latest version of Mono

To build Avalonia under Linux, you need to have a recent version of Mono installed. Mono is a cross- platform, open source .Net platform. There is a very good chance that the version of Mono that came with your Linux distribution is too old, so you want to install a more up-to-date version. The most convenient way to to this is through your package manager. The Mono project has great installation instructions for many popular Linux distros.

This will make the most up-to-date Mono release available through your package manager, and offer you updates as they become available.

Once you have your package manager configured for the Mono repository, install the mono-devel package, for example on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel

Once installed, check the version of mono to ensure it's at least 4.4.2:

mono --version

Clone the Avalonia repository

git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git
git submodule update --init

Restore nuget packages

Unless you have a very current version of monodevelop (6.1.x or newer), it is necessary to manually restore the Nuget depdendencies:

cd Avalonia
mkdir -p .nuget
wget -O .nuget/nuget.exe https://dist.nuget.org/win-x86-commandline/latest/nuget.exe
mono .nuget/nuget.exe restore Avalonia.sln

Build Avalonia

Build avalonia with xbuild:

xbuild /p:Configuration=Release Avalonia.travis-mono.sln

Open Avalonia in MonoDevelop

Start MonoDevelop and open the Avalonia.sln solution. Set the Samples/TestApplication project as the startup project and click Run.

There will be some compile errors in tests for the Windows platform, which can be safely ignored.

Enjoy playing with Avalonia! You may want to explore some of the other Samples for a flavor of the Platform