Installing .NET Core SDK on Debian Testing

tl;dr

  • install missing packages libicu52, libssl1.0.0 and liblttng-ust0
  • downgrade curl to stable release 7.38.0-4+deb8u5

Update 6/11/2017:-

Accidentally released the hold on curl/libcurl3, and dotnet command still works. I think that libcurl3 is only used when downloading framework and can be reset when done.

As part of a series of posts on deploying .NET Core applications to GKE, I had to install .NET Core SDK to my Debian laptop and make it work correctly. curl and gettext packages were already installed, so only libunwind8 was required.

$ sudo apt-get install libunwind8
$ mkdir -p ~/lib/.net
$ curl -sSL https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=848826 | tar xvzC ~/lib/.net/

After installation, I tried to run dotnet and it worked, but any arguments to dotnet caused a problem.

$ ~/lib/.net/dotnet

Microsoft .NET Core Shared Framework Host

...

$ ~/lib/.net/dotnet -h
Failed to initialize CoreCLR, HRESULT: 0x80131500

I figured that this was because .NET Core SDK is supported on Debian Stable, and I tend to run a mix of Testing/Sid packages. Quick check for missing libraries showed a few candidates, and most were easily resolved, with the exception of liblldb-3.6 for which a package could not be found.

$ find ~/lib/.net/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ldd | grep 'not found' | sort | uniq
        libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
		libicu18n.so.52 => not found
		libicuuc.so.52 => not found
		liblldb-3.6.so => not found
		liblttng-ust.so.0 => not found
		libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
$ sudo apt-get install -y libssl1.0.0 libicu52 liblttng-ust0
$ find ~/lib/.net/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ldd | grep 'not found' | sort | uniq
        liblldb-3.6.so => not found
$ ~/lib/.net/dotnet -h
.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.4)
Usage: dotnet [host-options] [command] [arguments] [common-options]

...

The command works, but trying to create a project generates a segfault. A quick Googling found a bugreport; segfault due to curl/libcurl3 using a more recent version of libssl than .NET Core. Downgrading the package fixed the problem.

$ sudo apt-get install curl=7.38.0-4+deb8u5 libcurl3=7.38.0-4+deb8u5
$ sudo apt-mark hold curl libcurl3