cabal - the simple guide just a simple guide for getting started with cabal. Tweet &nbssp;

1. Installation Download Cabal and cabal-install

source (Linux/OSX/Win) You'll need at least this version

cabal --version

cabal-install version 1.20.0.2

using version 1.20.0.1 of the Cabal library



2. create a sandbox create a new directory, open it and type

cabal sandbox init

to create a new sandbox in a subdirectory

of your current folder .cabal-sandbox

3. hackage package list update your local list of packages and dependencies, with

cabal update

this will get the newest versions listed on Hackage

4. external dependencies create a copy of a package by running the command

cabal install

Some flags can speed up this process

--only-dependencies

-jN to build N packages in parallel

--dry-run to see what cabal plans to do (recommended)

5. build application your sandbox consists of specific local version of packages you've just added and your project can be built with

cabal build you can find your executables in dist/build directory

6. Freeze Introduced in Cabal version 1.20

cabal freeze

is useful when building an application.

It produces a list of packages with their version numbers.

7. Repl You can play around with the code in GHCi:

cabal repl

This is much faster than rebuilding the executable

after every single change.

It is a ghci console, where you can :r reload the file.

8. Troubleshooting Sometimes different versions can cause build errors.

List all the registered packages:

ghc-pkg list

In special cases when you want to unregister specific packages:

ghc-pkg unregister packageName-0.0.1