How to install Mono in Raspberry Pi

What is mono? In short Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications part of the .NET Foundation. You can read more about it here. Well this article isn’t about the “What” it’s about the “How” to install mono in raspberry pi.

Mono isn’t available to download from the default repository of Raspberry Pi, therefore, we have to add it. The repositories are different for the version of raspbian you’re running. To check your raspberry pi OS version run the following command.

cat /etc/os-release

Run the following command to install the key that will authenticate the resources we download

sudo apt install apt-transport-https dirmngr gnupg ca-certificates

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF

Now that the key is installed we will need to add the repository. As we mentioned earlier the repositories are different for the version your Pi is running on. Mono offers repositories for Raspbian 10 (armhf) and Raspbian 9 (armhf). Copy the one according to your Raspbian version.

echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian stable-raspbianbuster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list

echo "deb https://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian stable-raspbianstretch main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official-stable.list

Once the repository is added, we need to update the system so that is flushes the cache and rebuilds it.

sudo apt update

You should see the repository has been reached and updated to the system. Refer to the image below.

Now that we have added and verified the repository. A one line command should install mono on your Raspberry Pi.

sudo apt install mono-complete 

That is it. We are done with installing Mono on our Raspberry Pi. If you like this article, you may love these.