Introduction to Mono on macOS

Mono supports macOS version 10.9 (Mavericks) and later.

Download the latest Mono release for Mac Run the.pkg file and accept the terms of the license. Mono is now installing: After the installation completed successfully, it’s a good idea to run through the basic hello world examples on this page to verify Mono is working correctly. What I observed was I installed wine and wine-mono: pacman -S wine wine-mono I then expected I'd be able to run a mono binary: wine mydotnetbin.exe But what I encountered was: 0009:err:mscoree:CLRRuntimeInfoGetRuntimeHost Wine Mono is not installed I found that I could manually install mono with the installer, which fixes the issue: wine.

You can use Mono on macOS to build server, console and GUI applications. Read below for the options available for GUI application development.

If you are interested in creating native GUI applications, use the MonoMac bindings and our MonoDevelop add-in. Read the description on MonoMac for more information on how to get started.

Installing Mono on macOS

You can use Mono either as a runtime to run existing application, or as an SDK to develop new applications with Mono.

Visit the download page to find the latest macOS package. Run it and follow the instructions there, you can either get a basic runtime, or a complete runtime plus a software development kit.

If you plan on developing applications with Mono, we suggest that you also install the MonoDevelop IDE after you install Mono.

The Mono package includes:

The Mono Runtime
GUI Toolkits: Windows.Forms and Gtk# for macOS.
- Note: the MonoMac GUI toolkit for native macOS GUI development is currently a separate download.
SDK: C#, Visual Basic compilers, assemblers and tools
XSP ASP.NET server
Manual pages.

This package installs as a framework into /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework (the same way the Java packages are installed). The executable binaries can be found in /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/bin. If you’d like to access the mono manpages you’ll have to add /Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Versions/Current/man to your manpath. The macOS Mono package does not include Gtk#, XSP or mod_mono. These will have to be compiled from source.

Our packages currently require macOS version 10.9 or later, for older versions, you will need to build from source code.

Using Mono on macOS

At this point, you must use Mono from the command line, the usual set of commands that are available on other ports of Mono are available.

To build applications you can use “mcs”, to run then you can use mono.

From a Terminal shell, you can try it out:

Most users would be using the MonoDevelop IDE to create their projects.

You will have a choice of GUI toolkits for building your application, from pure cross platform, to Mac-specific using MonoMac.

32 and 64 bit support

The Mono packages published on this web site provide both a 32-bit and a 64-bit Mono VM.

Starting from Mono 5.2 the mono command defaults to 64-bit, you can use the --arch=32/64 switch to control the bitness.

The 64 bit support has a few limitations today:

Our Windows.Forms implementation uses Carbon, and as such, it would not work with a 64-bit Mono.

Building Client Applications

There are a few choices to build client applications on macOS, you should pick the technology that better fits your goals, your choices are:

Toolkit	Runs on Linux	Runs on Windows	Runs on Mac	Binding Style	License	Status
MonoMac	no	no	yes	Strongly typed C# binding to Cocoa APIs	MIT X11	Actively developed, builds on the design lessons from MonoTouch but still incomplete. This will be the new default binding for Mono on macOS. Separate download.
Gtk#	yes	yes	yes	Strongly typed C# binding to the cross platform Gtk+ API. Applications look foreign on macOS.	LGPL v2	Actively developed, cross platform. Bundled with Mono.
Windows.Forms	yes	yes	yes	Cross platform implementation of Microsoft’s Windows.Forms. Applications look foreign on macOS.	MIT X11	The Windows.Forms API was frozen in time by Microsoft. Bundled with Mono.
MonObjc	no	no	yes	Binding to the native Cocoa APIs, but requires manual use of Objective-C selectors to work with, relatively thin wrapper around the underlying APIs.	LGPL v3	Actively developed. Separate download.
CocoaSharp	no	no	yes	Binding to the native Cocoa APIs, but requires manual use of Objective-C selectors to work with, relatively thin wrapper around the underlying APIs.	MIT X11	No longer developed, no longer maintained, deprecated. Bundled with Mono.

Running Mono applications on macOS

Running applications on macOS is very similar to linux systems, from the terminal:

For GTK# applications, it’s easiest to run them the same way but using xterm from X11.app

Windows.Forms

Mono’s implementation of the System.Windows.Forms API is built on top of Carbon and can only run with Mono on 32 bit systems. The look and feel of System.Windows.Forms applications mimics the Windows style and does not currently render like a native macOS application.

Third Party Libraries

ObjC# is a transparent two way bridge that allows the CLR to access the rich underlying ObjectiveC frameworks as well as providing direct access to the CLR frameworks from the ObjectiveC language.

Uninstalling Mono on macOS

Run this script in a terminal:

Mono is an open-source and cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. Wine can use a Windows build of Mono to run .NET applications.

1Installing

Installing

From source

Scp containment breach unity. From a source tree, you can use the 'make dev' target to build Wine Mono and configure the current Wine prefix (default or as set by the WINEPREFIX environment variable) to use the build. The 'make dev-setup' target will just configure the Wine prefix without building.

Shared Install

For packagers, and users with multiple prefixes, a shared install is recommended.

To create a shared install, download the appropriate binary tarball from https://dl.winehq.org/wine/wine-mono/ (or build it from source with 'make bin') and extract it to the appropriate location.

Wine will search for Wine Mono in the following places (replacing 5.0.0 with the expected version):

c:windowsmonomono-2.0. Extracting a tarball here is not recommended. If you want to install into a specific prefix, use the Prefix Local Install instructions below. It's only included in this list to make it clear that an installed .msi takes priority over the other loctions.
The directory specified in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareWineMono string value 'RuntimePath'.
${prefix}/share/wine/mono/wine-mono-5.0.0 or ${builddir}/./mono/wine-mono-5.0.0
/usr/share/wine/mono/wine-mono-5.0.0
/opt/wine/mono/wine-mono-5.0.0

When using a shared install, The 'Wine Mono Windows Support' package must still be installed in the prefix. This is handled automatically on prefix update, so normally it shouldn't be a problem, but in some corner cases you might have to run 'wineboot -u' to set this up after creating the shared install.

Prefix Local Install

Wine will automatically download and install the appropriate Wine Mono MSI on prefix update, so this shouldn't usually be necessary.

If you wish to use a different MSI installer than the one you'd get automatically:

Obtain the MSI file you wish to use, either from https://dl.winehq.org/wine/wine-mono/ or by running 'make msi' in a build tree. It's possible you

Wine Mono Is Not Installed Mac