cabal - the simple guide
just a simple guide for getting started with cabal.
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Download Cabal and cabal-install
instructions (Linux/OSX)
instructions (Win)
You'll need at least this version
cabal --version
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
update your local list of packages and dependencies, with
cabal update
this will get the newest versions listed on Hackage
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)
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
Introduced in Cabal version 1.20
cabal freeze
is useful when building an application.
It produces a list of packages with their version numbers.
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.
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
attaching patched or an unreleased version of a library
cabal sandbox add-source
delete sandbox
cabal sandbox delete
alternative manual clean
rm -rf .cabal-sandbox cabal.sandbox.config