Building MonoDevelop

Installing dependencies

MonoDevelop requires the following packages (or newer versions):

• Mono 2.10
• Mono.Addins 0.6
• Gtk# 2.12.10

You can build them from git, source releases or, even easier, simply install the pre-built packages appropriate for your platform.

We strongly recommend you install everything from packages if possible. If not, you should use a Parallel Mono Environment. Do not install anything to /usr or /usr/local unless you completely understand the implications of doing do.

Note that if your distro has sufficiently up-to-date GTK# or Mono.Addins packages, you can configure a parallel Mono environment to use them instead of building them from source. See the section on MONO_GAC_PREFIX in the Parallel Mono Environment guide.

Building from Git

After getting the source code from GitHub, run the following code in the root directory:

./configure

It may fail because of missing dependencies; install them, and re-run the command.

This script allows selecting and configuring a set of MonoDevelop modules to be included in an integrated build. The MonoDevelop build system consists of a 'main' module, which contains the main distribution, and a number of additional add-ins in subdirectories of 'extras'.

The 'extras' add-ins are designed to be built and distributed separately, and therefore build against your system-installed MonoDevelop by default. However, this script sets them up to build against the MonoDevelop in 'main', and ensures that they will be loaded when MonoDevelop is launched with 'make run' in this top-level directory. This is very useful for development and testing.

You can select the list of extra add-ins to be built by running this command:

./configure --select

Further executions of the configure script will configure only the selected add-ins.

You can also configure a predefined list of modules by specifying a build profile using the --profile option. Use the --help option to get information about available profiles and other build options.

make run

Building from Tarballs

MonoDevelop is split in several tarballs: one for the main application, and one for each optional add-in. You can get the tarballs from the Download page.

First of all you have to configure and install the main tarball:

./configure
./make
./make install

The configure script may fail because of missing dependencies; install them, and re-run the command.

After this, you can build and install any of the additional tarballs using the same procedure.

Prerequisites and Source

• Install GTK# (installer).
• Install the Mono libraries package (installer).
• Install MSysGit (from here)
• Install GNU Gettext tools (from here)
• Get MonoDevelop from GitHub.

Building using Visual Studio or MonoDevelop

You need at least Visual Studio 2008 or MonoDevelop 3.0.5. 

• Open main/Main.sln.
• Select the DebugWin32/x86 configuration.
• Build the solution.

Building using MSBuild

Open a terminal in main and run winbuild.bat (or winbuild.sh from MSysGit bash). You can easily run MD directly after building with the winrun.bat/sh script.