3.3 KiB
Although cabal-install automatically installs Haskell library dependencies, and selects a specific version of ghc (see with-compiler). However, cabal-install will fail if the required version of ghc is not available. Unfortunately, many operating systems do not offer a way to install specific versions of ghc.
ghcup makes it easy to install specific versions of ghc on GNU/Linux, and can also bootstrap a fresh Haskell developer environment from scratch.
Inspired by rustup, pyenv and jenv.
OS X users may prefer futurice and Ubuntu users may prefer hvr's ppa.
Table of Contents
Installation
Just place the ghcup shell script into your PATH anywhere.
E.g.:
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haskell/ghcup/master/ghcup > ~/.local/bin/ghcup
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/ghcup
Then adjust your PATH in ~/.bashrc (or similar, depending on your shell) like so, for example:
export PATH="$HOME/.cabal/bin:$HOME/.ghcup/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
Usage
See ghcup --help.
Contributing
- PR or email
- this script is POSIX shell
- use shellcheck and
checkbashisms.plfrom debian devscripts - whitespaces, no tabs
Known problems
Limited distributions supported
Currently only GNU/Linux distributions compatible with the upstream GHC binaries are supported.
Precompiled binaries
Since this uses precompiled binaries you may run into problems with ncurses and missing libtinfo, in case your distribution doesn't use the legacy way of building ncurses and has no compatibility symlinks in place.
Ask your distributor on how to solve this or
try to compile from source via ghcup compile <version>.
Unreliable download location
There is no single reliable URL where to download future GHC binary releases from, since the tarball names contain the distro name and version they were built on. As such, we cannot foresee what will be the next tarball name.
In such a case, consider to update this script via
ghcup self-update.
Compilation
Although this script can compile GHC for you, it's just a very thin wrapper around the build system. It makes no effort in trying to figure out whether you have the correct toolchain and the correct dependencies. Refer to the official docs on how to prepare your environment for building GHC.