Avalonia/docs/guidelines/build.md

Building Avalonia

Windows

Avalonia requires 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

We currently need to build our own private version of some libraries. These are linked as submodules in the git repository, so run:

git submodule update --init

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 required packages:

• mono-devel
• referenceassemblies-pcl
• monodevelop

Clone the Avalonia repository

git clone https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.git

Update the submodules

The Avalonia repository contains a few submodules, which need to be manually updated.

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.mono.sln

Build Avalonia

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