Setting up Xamarin.Android on Linux

A guide to getting Xamarin.Android ready to use on your distro of choice! The guide was originally based on a system running Ubuntu, but it should be very straightforward to get it to work on other distros as well.

Note that this is officially unsupported, but it can be used as a loose guide to help in setting this up on your system.

Why?

Xamarin has stated that there are no plans to officially support Linux. However, since they open sourced Xamarin, recently they have added support for building on Linux!

Let's start

Prerequisites

• Latest mono packages for your platform

Obtain Xamarin.Android binaries

Prebuilt Releases (Recommended)

The latest successful artifacts from automated builds for Linux are available here: https://jenkins.mono-project.com/view/Xamarin.Android/job/xamarin-android-linux/lastSuccessfulBuild/Azure/

Download the oss-xamarin.android* package to your system and extract it.

From source

See their instructions on building from source.

Environment setup

Install the Android SDK and NDK, then set environment variables:

(You may have to adjust the paths; these are the default for Android Studio)

export ANDROID_SDK_PATH=$HOME/Android/Sdk
export ANDROID_NDK_PATH=$HOME/Android/Sdk/ndk-bundle

Test build

Build a test project (there's one in the source repository) for Xamarin.Android.

/path/to/oss-xamarin.android*/bin/Debug/bin/xabuild /path/to/YourTestProject.csproj

The build should complete successfully. Next, try building a signed package:

/path/to/oss-xamarin.android*/bin/Debug/bin/xabuild /path/to/YourTestProject.csproj /t:SignAndroidPackage

This will invoke keytool and generate a keystore and use it to sign an .apk file, which will go to your output directory with a name like YourTestProject-Signed.apk.

Bonus: IDE (especially JetBrains Rider) support

This will enable building Xamarin.Android projects directly from msbuild.

DISCLAIMER: This is not officially supported. AFAIK Rider only supports Xamarin on Windows/macOS, as Xamarin does not officially support or provide packages for Linux.

WARNING: These steps require root access and modifying your Mono installation.

First, change to your unpacked build of Xamarin.Android:

cd /path/to/oss-xamarin.android*/

Now, you will need to copy build configuration and tools to /usr/lib/mono.

sudo cp -r bin/Debug/lib/* /usr/lib/mono

Let's also copy the Xamarin.Android tools in bin:

sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/mono/xamarin-android/bin/
sudo cp -r bin/Debug/bin/* /usr/lib/mono/xamarin-android/bin/

This will put the MSBuild targets where msbuild expects them.

At this point, if you try to build, msbuild will complain about being unable to locate mandroid.

Now, you will have to add additional props to your .csproj file to help msbuild find the tools it needs.

Add a conditional PropertyGroup for Linux like this:

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(OS)' == 'Unix' ">
    <MonoAndroidToolsDirectory>/usr/lib/mono/mandroid</MonoAndroidToolsDirectory>
    <MonoAndroidBinDirectory>/usr/lib/mono/xamarin-android/bin</MonoAndroidBinDirectory>
    <AndroidSdkDirectory>$(ANDROID_SDK_PATH)</AndroidSdkDirectory>
    <AndroidNdkDirectory>$(ANDROID_NDK_PATH)</AndroidNdkDirectory>
</PropertyGroup>

This will tell msbuild where to find build tools and scripts for Xamarin.Android! Make sure your ANDROID_SDK_PATH and ANDROID_NDK_PATH environment variables are set, or change the paths accordingly.

You should now be able to build your Xamarin.Android project from the command line!

Finally, there's one last trick Rider has: it will provide its own Android SDK path by default. To fix that, go into Rider's settings and change the path to the Android SDK in its options.

You should now be able to open and successfully build Xamarin.Android projects in Rider! We did it! :)