What is the best way to run ServiceStack on Linux / Mono?

Update for Linux

From the v4.5.2 Release ServiceStack now supports .NET Core which offers significant performance and stability improvements over Mono that’s derived from a shared cross-platform code-base and supported by Microsoft’s well-resourced, active and responsive team. If you’re currently running ServiceStack on Mono, we strongly recommend upgrading to .NET Core to take advantage of its superior performance, stability and its top-to-bottom supported Technology Stack.

Update for Mono

Our recommended Setup for hosting ASP .NET sites on Linux and Mono is to use nginx/HyperFastCgi. We’ve published a step-by-step guide going through creating an Ubuntu VM from scratch complete with deploy / install / conf / init scripts at mono-server-config.

We’re no longer recommending MonoFastCGI after noticing several stability and performance issues. This blog post provides a good analysis of the performance, memory usage and stability of the different ASP.NET Hosting options in Mono.

Development

XSP is similar to VS.NET WebDev server – a simple standalone ASP.NET WebServer written in C#. This is suitable for development or small work loads. You just run it from the root directory of your ServiceStack ASP.NET host which will make it available at http://localhost:8080.

Production

For external internet services you generally want to host ServiceStack web services as part of a full-featured Web Server. The 2 most popular full-featured web servers for Linux are:

Nginx

Use Mono FastCGI to host ServiceStack ASP.NET hosts in Nginx.

Apache

Use mod_mono to host ServiceStack ASP.NET hosts in an Apache HTTP Server.

Self Hosting

ServiceStack also supports self-hosting which lets you run your ServiceStack webservices on its own in a standalone Console application (i.e. without a web server). This is a good idea when you don’t need the services of a full-featured web server (e.g: you just need to host web services internally on an Intranet).

By default the same ServiceStack Console app binary runs on both Windows/.NET and Mono/Linux as-is. Although if you wish, you can easily daemonize your application to run as a Linux daemon as outlined here. The wiki page also includes instructions for configuring your self-hosted web service to run behind an Nginx or Apache reverse proxy.

Since it provides a good fit for Heroku’s Concurrency model as detailed in their 12 factor app self-hosting will be an area we’ll be looking to provide increased support around in the near future.

ServiceStack.net Nginx / Mono FastCGI configuration

The servicestack.net website itself (inc. all live demos) runs on an Ubuntu hetzner vServer using Nginx + Mono FastCGI.

This command is used to start the FastCGI background process:

fastcgi-mono-server4 --appconfigdir /etc/rc.d/init.d/mono-fastcgi 
  /socket=tcp:127.0.0.1:9000 /logfile=/var/log/mono/fastcgi.log &

Which hosts all applications defined in *.webapp files in the /etc/rc.d/init.d/mono-fastcgi folder specified using XSP’s WebApp File Format, e.g:

ServiceStack.webapp:

<apps>
<web-application>
        <name>ServiceStack.Northwind</name>
        <vhost>*</vhost>
        <vport>80</vport>
        <vpath>/ServiceStack.Northwind</vpath>
        <path>/home/mythz/src/ServiceStack.Northwind</path>
</web-application>
</apps>

This runs the FastCGI Mono process in the background which you can get Nginx to connect to by adding this rule to nginx.conf:

location ~ /(ServiceStack|RedisAdminUI|RedisStackOverflow|RestFiles)\.* {  
   root /usr/share/nginx/mono/servicestack.net/;  
   index index.html index.htm index.aspx default.htm Default.htm;  
   fastcgi_index /default.htm;
   fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;  
   fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/servicestack.net$fastcgi_script_name;
   include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;  
}

Which will forward any route starting with /ServiceStack or /RedisAdminUI, etc to the FastCGI mono server process for processing. Some example apps hosted this way:

For those interested the full Nginx + FastCGI configuration files for servicestack.net are available for download.