Install .NET Core SDK or .NET Core Runtime on CentOS

• 06/04/2020
• 10 minutes to read
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.NET Core is supported on CentOS. This article describes how to install .NET Core on CentOS.

Install the SDK (which includes the runtime) if you want to develop .NET apps. Or, if you only need to run apps, install the runtime. If you're installing the runtime, we suggest you install the ASP.NET Core runtime as it includes both .NET Core and ASP.NET Core runtimes.

If you've already installed the SDK or runtime, use the dotnet --list-sdks and dotnet --list-runtimes commands to see which versions are installed. For more information, see How to check that .NET Core is already installed.

Package manager installs are only supported on the x64 architecture. Other architectures, such as ARM, must manually install the .NET Core SDK or .NET Core Runtime. For more information, see the manually install section below.

Supported distributions

The following table is a list of currently supported .NET Core releases on both CentOS 7 and CentOS 8. These versions remain supported until either the version of .NET Core reaches end-of-support or the version of CentOS is no longer supported.

• A ✔️ indicates that the version of CentOS or .NET Core is still supported.
• A ❌ indicates that the version of CentOS or .NET Core isn't supported on that CentOS release.
• When both a version of CentOS and a version of .NET Core have ✔️, that OS and .NET combination are supported.

The following versions of .NET Core are no longer supported. The downloads for these still remain published:

• 3.0
• 2.2
• 2.0

Package manager installs are only supported on the x64 architecture. Other architectures, such as ARM, must manually install the .NET Core SDK or .NET Core Runtime. For more information, see the manually install section below.

How to install other versions

The packages added to package manager feeds are named in a hackable format: {product}-{type}-{version}.

• product
  The type of .NET product to install. Valid options are:

  • dotnet
  • aspnetcore

• type
  Chooses the SDK or the runtime. Valid options are:

  • sdk
  • runtime

• version
  The version of the SDK or runtime to install. This article will always give the instructions for the latest supported version. Valid options are any released version, such as:

  • 3.1
  • 3.0
  • 2.1

  It's possible the SDK/runtime you're trying to download is not available for your Linux distribution. For a list of supported distributions, see .NET Core dependencies and requirements.

Examples

• Install the ASP.NET Core 3.1 runtime: aspnetcore-runtime-3.1
• Install the .NET Core 2.1 runtime: dotnet-runtime-2.1
• Install the .NET Core 3.1 SDK: dotnet-sdk-3.1

Package missing

If the package-version combination doesn't work, it's not available. For example, there isn't an ASP.NET Core SDK, the SDK components are included with the .NET Core SDK. The value aspnetcore-sdk-2.2 is incorrect and should be dotnet-sdk-2.2. For a list of Linux distributions supported by .NET Core, see .NET Core dependencies and requirements.

CentOS 8 ✔️

.NET Core 3.1 is available in the default package repositories for CentOS 8.

Install the SDK

.NET Core SDK allows you to develop apps with .NET Core. If you install .NET Core SDK, you don't need to install the corresponding runtime. To install .NET Core SDK, run the following commands:

sudo dnf install dotnet-sdk-3.1

Install the runtime

The .NET Core Runtime allows you to run apps that were made with .NET Core that didn't include the runtime. The commands below install the ASP.NET Core Runtime, which is the most compatible runtime for .NET Core. In your terminal, run the following commands.

sudo dnf install aspnetcore-runtime-3.1

As an alternative to the ASP.NET Core Runtime, you can install the .NET Core Runtime that doesn't include ASP.NET Core support: replace aspnetcore-runtime-3.1 in the command above with dotnet-runtime-3.1.

sudo dnf install dotnet-runtime-3.1

CentOS 7 ✔️

Before you install .NET, run the following commands to add the Microsoft package signing key to your list of trusted keys and add the Microsoft package repository. Open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo rpm -Uvh https://packages.microsoft.com/config/centos/7/packages-microsoft-prod.rpm

Install the SDK

.NET Core SDK allows you to develop apps with .NET Core. If you install .NET Core SDK, you don't need to install the corresponding runtime. To install .NET Core SDK, run the following commands:

sudo yum install dotnet-sdk-3.1

Install the runtime

The .NET Core Runtime allows you to run apps that were made with .NET Core that didn't include the runtime. The commands below install the ASP.NET Core Runtime, which is the most compatible runtime for .NET Core. In your terminal, run the following commands.

sudo yum install aspnetcore-runtime-3.1

As an alternative to the ASP.NET Core Runtime, you can install the .NET Core Runtime that doesn't include ASP.NET Core support: replace aspnetcore-runtime-2.1 in the command above with dotnet-runtime-3.1.

sudo yum install dotnet-runtime-3.1

Troubleshoot the package manager

This section provides information on common errors you may get while using the package manager to install .NET Core.

Failed to fetch

While installing the .NET Core package, you may see an error similar to signature verification failed for file 'repomd.xml' from repository 'packages-microsoft-com-prod'. Generally speaking, this error means that the package feed for .NET Core is being upgraded with newer package versions, and that you should try again later. During an upgrade, the package feed should not be unavailable for more than 2 hours. If you continually receive this error for more than 2 hours, please file an issue at https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues.

Snap

.NET Core is available from the Snap Store.

A snap is a bundle of an app and its dependencies that works without modification across many different Linux distributions. Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store. For more information about Snap, see Getting started with Snap.

Only supported versions of .NET Core are available through Snap.

Install the SDK

Snap packages for .NET Core SDK are all published under the same identifier: dotnet-sdk. A specific version of the SDK can be installed by specifying the channel. The SDK includes the coresponding runtime. The following table list the channels:

Use the snap install command to install a .NET Core SDK snap package. Use the --channel parameter to indicate which version to install. If this parameter is omitted, latest/stable is used. In this example, 3.1 is specified:

sudo snap install dotnet-sdk --classic --channel=3.1

Next, register the dotnet command for the system with the snap alias command:

sudo snap alias dotnet-sdk.dotnet dotnet

This command is formatted as: sudo snap alias {package}.{command} {alias}. You can choose any {alias} name you would like. For example, you could name the command after the specific version installed by snap: sudo snap alias dotnet-sdk.dotnet dotnet31. When you use the command dotnet31, you'll invoke this specific version of .NET. But this is incompatible with most tutorials and examples as they expect a dotnet command to be available.

Install the runtime

Snap packages for .NET Core Runtime are each published under their own package identifier. The following table lists the package identifiers:

Use the snap install command to install a .NET Core Runtime snap package. In this example, .NET Core 3.1 is installed:

sudo snap install dotnet-runtime-31 --classic

Next, register the dotnet command for the system with the snap alias command:

sudo snap alias dotnet-runtime-31.dotnet dotnet

This command is formatted as: sudo snap alias {package}.{command} {alias}. You can choose any {alias} name you would like. For example, you could name the command after the specific version installed by snap: sudo snap alias dotnet-runtime-31.dotnet dotnet31. When you use the command dotnet31, you'll invoke this specific version of .NET. But this is incompatible with most tutorials and examples as they expect a dotnet command to be available.

SSL Certificate errors

When .NET is installed through Snap, it's possible that on some distros the .NET SSL certificates may not be found and you may receive an error similar to the following during restore:

Processing post-creation actions...
Running 'dotnet restore' on /home/myhome/test/test.csproj...
  Restoring packages for /home/myhome/test/test.csproj...
/snap/dotnet-sdk/27/sdk/2.2.103/NuGet.targets(114,5): error : Unable to load the service index for source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json. [/home/myhome/test/test.csproj]
/snap/dotnet-sdk/27/sdk/2.2.103/NuGet.targets(114,5): error :   The SSL connection could not be established, see inner exception. [/home/myhome/test/test.csproj]
/snap/dotnet-sdk/27/sdk/2.2.103/NuGet.targets(114,5): error :   The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure. [/home/myhome/test/test.csproj]

To resolve this issue, set a few enviornment variables:

export SSL_CERT_FILE=[path-to-certificate-file]
export SSL_CERT_DIR=/dev/null

The certificate location will vary by distro. Here are the locations for the distros where we have experienced the issue.

• Fedora - /etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/pem/tls-ca-bundle.pem
• OpenSUSE - /etc/ssl/ca-bundle.pem
• Solus - /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

Dependencies

When you install with a package manager, these libraries are installed for you. But, if you manually install .NET Core or you publish a self-contained app, you'll need to make sure these libraries are installed:

• krb5-libs
• libicu
• openssl-libs

If the target runtime environment's OpenSSL version is 1.1 or newer, you'll need to install compat-openssl10.

For more information about the dependencies, see Self-contained Linux apps.

For .NET Core apps that use the System.Drawing.Common assembly, you'll also need the following dependency:

• libgdiplus (version 6.0.1 or later)

  Warning

  You can install a recent version of libgdiplus by adding the Mono repository to your system. For more information, see https://www.mono-project.com/download/stable/.

Scripted install

The dotnet-install scripts are used for automation and non-admin installs of the SDK and Runtime. You can download the script from https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh.

The script defaults to installing the latest SDK long term support (LTS) version, which is .NET Core 3.1. To install the current release, which may not be an (LTS) version, use the -c Current parameter.

./dotnet-install.sh -c Current

To install .NET Core Runtime instead of the SDK, use the --runtime parameter.

./dotnet-install.sh -c Current --runtime aspnetcore

You can install a specific version by altering the -c parameter to indicate the specific version. The following command installs .NET Core SDK 3.1.

./dotnet-install.sh -c 3.1

For more information, see dotnet-install scripts reference.

Manual install

As an alternative to the package managers, you can download and manually install the SDK and runtime. Manual install is usually performed as part of continuous integration testing or on an unsupported Linux distribution. For a developer or user, it's generally better to use a package manager.

If you install .NET Core SDK, you don't need to install the corresponding runtime. First, download a binary release for either the SDK or the runtime from one of the following sites:

• ✔️ .NET 5.0 preview downloads
• ✔️ .NET Core 3.1 downloads
• ✔️ .NET Core 2.1 downloads
• All .NET Core downloads

Next, extract the downloaded file and use the export command to set variables used by .NET Core and then ensure .NET Core is in PATH.

To extract the runtime and make the .NET Core CLI commands available at the terminal, first download a .NET Core binary release. Then, open a terminal and run the following commands from the directory where the file was saved. The archive file name may be different depending on what you downloaded.

Use the following command to extract the runtime:

mkdir -p "$HOME/dotnet" && tar zxf aspnetcore-runtime-3.1.0-linux-x64.tar.gz -C "$HOME/dotnet"
export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/dotnet
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/dotnet

Use the following command to extract the SDK:

mkdir -p "$HOME/dotnet" && tar zxf dotnet-sdk-3.1.301-linux-x64.tar.gz -C "$HOME/dotnet"
export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/dotnet
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/dotnet

This approach lets you install different versions into separate locations and choose explicitly which one to use by which application.

Next steps

• Tutorial: Create a console application with .NET Core SDK using Visual Studio Code