1. IronOCR
2. Get Started
3. Linux Setup Guide

IronOCR Linux Compatibility & Setup Guide

IronOCR supports Linux for .NET Core and .NET 5 applications, as well as Docker, Azure, macOS and (naturally) Windows.

We recommend using .NET Core 3.1 and any other runtimes marked as LTS by Microsoft because they have guaranteed long-term support and are generally well tested on Linux.

No code changes are required to run on IronOCR Linux. Generally, IronOCR works out of the box thanks to hundreds of hours of testing and configuration by our engineers.

Linux support is important because many cloud services such as Azure Web Apps, Azure Functions, AWS EC2, AWS Lambda, Azure DevOps Docker rely heavily on Linux. At Iron Software we use these cloud tools regularly and understand that many of our Enterprise and SAAS customers do too.

Officially Supported Linux Distros

We officially support and recommend the latest 64-bit Linux OS's below for "zero configuration" setup of IronOCR.

• Ubuntu 20
• Ubuntu 18
• Debian 11
• Debian 10 [Currently the Microsoft Azure Default Linux Distro]

Please read "Other Linux Distros" below for advice on installing IronOCR on a version of Linux which is not officially supported.

IronOCR NuGet Packages

Install-Package IronOcr

Ubuntu Compatibility

Ubuntu is our most tested Linux operating system. This is because it is used heavily in the Azure infrastructure we use for continuous testing and deployment. This platform also has official Microsoft .NET support and official Docker Images.

Ubuntu 20

Manual Ubuntu 20 Setup: If you wish to manually install or your app cannot be run with sudo admin privileges.

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

Ubuntu 18

Manual Ubuntu 18 Setup: If you wish to manually install or your app cannot be run with sudo admin privileges.

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

Debian 11

Debian 10 is the default Linux distribution used by Microsoft when adding Docker support to a .NET project in Visual Studio.

Manual Debian 11 Setup: If you wish to manually install or your app cannot be run with sudo admin privileges.

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

Debian 10

Debian 10 is the default Linux distribution used by Microsoft when adding Docker support to a .NET project in Visual Studio.

Manual Debian 10 Setup: If you wish to manually install or your app cannot be run with sudo admin privileges.

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev

Other Linux Distros

Regardless of whether you use HFS, yum, apt, or apt-get as your package manager, the requirements remain pretty much constant.

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages and Tesseract OCR
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev tesseract-ocr libtesseract-dev

# Update the package list
sudo apt update

# Install necessary packages and Tesseract OCR
sudo apt install -y apt-utils libgdiplus libc6-dev tesseract-ocr libtesseract-dev