Build Environment

Getting Started

If you want to help us by contributing code, great! The CKAN is coded using C#, targeting Mono 4.0. Free tools exist for all the major platforms:

Ubuntu / Linux

You will absolutely need to install the package mono-xbuild to be able to build CKAN. If you are looking for a nice IDE, you can try installing monodevelop. If you aren't using the IDE, you will probably need to separately install the NUnit interface package nunit-console.

If you'd like a more recent version of MonoDevelop than what's packaged with Ubuntu:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ermshiperete/monodevelop-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install monodevelop-5

This will install monodevelop betas into /opt/monodevelop.

You can create a command-line alias for the new monodevelop:

echo "alias monodevelop='/opt/monodevelop/bin/monodevelop-launcher.sh'" >> ~/.bashrc

You will have to re-open your shell for the alias to take effect.

Note: If the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib library gives errors and there is something about 'CodePage 437 not supported', then you need to install internationalization packages, such as libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil.

After setting up your development environment, you should look at Building CKAN on Linux

Windows

First, you will need an IDE. Some common (and free) choices are:

• Visual Studio Community
• SharpDevelop
• MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio

It's also essential that you install NUnit to be able to run the test suits.

If you using Visual Studio Community or happen to have access to a license for Visual Studio Pro, ReSharper is very nice to have (a free license can be requested for open source projects).

Mac

Help us, Mac users! How do you get started with mono development?

Both MonoDevelop and NUnit are available for OSX from their respective websites.