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Trying Out the .NET Core Umbraco Alpha Release

Many times since I started using Umbraco (some 11 years ago), I’ve been in situations where it’d have been nice (read: not so risky) to be able to run a local development version of an Umbraco website. But it’s never been possible on a Mac, unless you were using a VM or something similar. So I’ve had a Windows laptop on hand for these occasions.

So when I learned that now there was an alpha version available that people had apparently been able to run natively on macOS I was all “where do I sign my name and get a copy of it?”

Hands on

Getting my hands on the actual alpha release was not difficult - this blogpost on umbraco.com gave me the initial pointers. I didn’t do the CLI stuff since I already had Visual Studio for Mac installed and figured I’d try using that.

The actual steps I followed were these:

  1. Download and install the .NET Core 3.1 installer from Microsoft’s site

  2. Add the custom NuGet feed as described

    dotnet nuget add source "https://www.myget.org/F/umbracoprereleases/api/v3/index.json" -n "Umbraco Prereleases"

  3. Install the Umbraco dotnet template

    dotnet new -i Umbraco.Templates::0.5.0-alpha001

  4. Created a new empty solution

    dotnet new umbraco -n UmbraMaco

    (yes, I chose a better name than MyCustomUmbracoSolution :-))

At this point, the blogpost boldly states that I can “open the newly created project in [my] favourite IDE” - while Visual Studio isn’t exactly “my favourite”, it’s probably the only IDE I have that’ll open a .NET project, so I went ahead and did just that.

Roadblock(s) ahead

As soon as I opened the project, I could tell from the red messages that something wasn’t all well. I managed to quite quickly (and I’m very proud of this, as I have no idea how stuff works in Visual Studio) figure out that even though I’d added the custom NuGet feed on the command-line, that Visual Studio wanted its own instruction about this. So I found out where to specify NuGet feeds and added it in. Then I hit reload (or what ever it says on the button that makes the project refresh its packages etc.)

Lo and behold, there was a total lack of red messages and I challenged myself to press the Play button…

I was treated with a pile of messages flying by, and eventually the familiar install screen opening in a web browser, and I typed my name and my email address and came up with “a very good password” (TM) and slammed my head into the next roadblock…

It’s a database. We base all our data on it.

I’ve installed Umbraco hundreds of times so I don’t know why I was suddenly confused about the next screen, where I was tasked with the (seemingly) simple job of choosing whether to use Microsoft SQL or something Azure’y, or maybe I had a custom Connection String I’d like to use for the database to use for this Umbraco site?

I think I’d been counting on SQL-CE being available, but as I’d have know, had I read the rest of the blogpost, SQL-CE is a Windows-only requirement, so isn’t installed by default.

I did some DuckDuckGo-ing (aka Google-ing, ed.) and saw the words Docker and Container and my mind went blank…

I closed the browser and shut down Visual Studio and went for a walk with the dog.

When in doubt, read tweets

Returning from the walk, I saw a tweet from René Pjengaard and I replied that I was stuck. Of course, the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Men of Umbraco friends immediately rose to the rescue by confirming my earlier findings - to try using Docker and get an instance of MSSQL running in there. So I got back in the saddle and whipped open “the download program” (web browser, ed.).

How did I get it to work?

From a post that’s a couple of years old, I got the basics of how to use Docker and install MSSQL.

I also managed to launch the Docker image and then I had another “Finding Nemo After the End Credits Sequence” - “Now What?” moment (https://twitter.com/greystate/status/1301634901696020480)

But then I thought, “What the heck” - the thing is running (it says) so maybe I can try with SQLPro? (It’s one of a suite of native Mac apps for working with databases that I got from the Mac App Store). I’ve used the app for connecting to Umbraco Cloud databases on and off, so it just might work?

I tried connecting to it by specifying localhost as the server and providing the credentials and it worked! (Yes, I’m an experienced developer and I google stuff and I was utterly surprised to actually see this work).

All that was left was to create a database and then restart the Umbraco site from Visual Studio.

And then I got all the way to the familiar Umbraco Backoffice, but running locally on my Mac. Surreal for real.