Listed on the ServiceStack website it shows that ServiceStack can run on Mono with either:
What are these different configurations and which is preferred for Web Services on Mono?
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.
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.
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.
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:
Use Mono FastCGI to host ServiceStack ASP.NET hosts in Nginx.
Use mod_mono to host ServiceStack ASP.NET hosts in an Apache HTTP Server.
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.
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.